Because industry analyses certainly suck.
Nintendo
The river of money is over. After selling loads of Wii and DS, they announced the 3DS so that everybody can forget about a new console for the living room. They’re screwed with their prices: the simple Nintendo DS is still 129 bucks and they can’t lower their prices on everything, that would badly cut their profits and send a message that they’re sweating. They still don’t sell colored Wii with the new wiimotionplus-ed wiimote. And the 3DS is going to be expensive while only Nintendo is going to make the 3D screen something awesome. People won’t jump on it. There’s competition in this price range of mobile game devices to which we can add the Apple, Windows Phone 7 Android combo and maybe Playstation Phone too by the time the 3DS is available.
Sony
Still losing blood. People wanting to have motion control in the living room already have a Wii. Others don’t really care. I mean Sony is communicating on shipped numbers (as usual) and “consumer purchase intent” being better than it was before. How weak is that. You see, if you start from 0 and sales go to 1, that’s an increase of 100%. But it’s actually still shitty. The big problem is they don’t have any big title for the Move or even for the PS3. They have nothing for the end of the year and are barely getting out of the red financially. The PS3 is IMO, since the first announcements, the biggest entertainment product failure ever seen. They failed everybody in the chain. Sad.
Microsoft
On the roll. Whatever you think about the Kinect, it’s the next step: after having stuff in your hands, how about having nothing? MS gets the technology edge with their product and unlike Sony, they have a killer app: Dance Central. They’re also selling the new 360 stealth like hot cakes (I wonder the detailed sales with women and minorities) here in the US and the 360 has the widest catalog of games hands down. Oh and on the mobile front, WP7 is out, works well and games on WP7 phones are already way better than their counterpart on Android (who’s the big thing these days). And Live integration. And XNA. I mean, they have something absolutely huge in their hands and it’s called Momentum.
This end of the year probably will not escape Redmond giant’s supremacy.
One reply on “MSN Brawl”
Yeah. I don’t think you should be dismissing Nintendo so fast. The 3DS is just a diversion piggybacking on the DS success while waiting for their next big thing. Considering how long Sony made money off the PS2, Nintendo will keep milking the current DS/Wii installed based for a looong time. And from every interview I read, Iwata and co have a perfect analysis of the market, they’re on top of their game. Also, they have billions in cash and they’re the only hardware makers who *really* understand games : wake me up when MS or Sony can do internally the kind of magic that Nintendo regularly pulls off (Animal Crossing, Mario Galaxy, Wii sports, etc…).
They completely reinvented the market once. I, for one, trust that they will surprise us again.
Meanwhile Kinect… meh. Lack of any clear cut input (like a button!) makes it feel gimmicky. I don’t think it will be long lasting in its current incarnation and I don’t even think it’ll take off in countries where people don’t live in McMansions with huge living rooms. Even if it does, Xbox division as a whole is still a huge money hole in Microsoft’s pocket. Kinect is not going to save them.