Everyone’s favorite video game industry analyst Michael Pachter had a lot to say about this holiday season, going so far as to claim that this may be one of the biggest years for gaming hardware sales ever.
In an interview with IndustryGamers, Mr. Pachter explained his reasoning for such a bold claim, citing the ever-growing rivalry between gaming giants Sony and Microsoft.
We see a console battle heating up this holiday, with Microsoft celebrating the anniversary of its Kinect launch with a media blitz. We think that Sony will respond in kind, and expect Nintendo to follow with advertising of its own. This holiday may be one of the most successful hardware sales periods ever (in terms of units) given appropriate pricing for the three consoles and recent discounting for the handhelds.
As one might expect, with a substantial growth in hardware sales we’ll likely see a similar increase in software sales. The incredible game lineup this fall will only help to propel sales further and build up some serious momentum as we move into 2012.
We expect October sales to be up in the solid double-digits, and think that November and December sales will be up as well. Rolling into 2012, we think that games like Darkness II, Mass Effect 3, Max Payne 3 and Ghost Recon Future Soldier have the potential to drive solidly positive sales growth in the early part of the year.
Once new hardware launches (the PS Vita in March and the Wii U later in 2012), we think that continuing declines on Nintendo platforms will be fully offset with software sales from the new platforms. Overall, we expect 8% software sales growth in 2012, which should allow for publisher multiples to expand.
Whether or not this holiday season will in fact go down in history as one of gaming’s greatest, one thing is for sure, we’ll all have more awesome games than we’ll know what to do with.
