Ben-DutkaThe world of video game technology continues to advance at a rapid rate, and there are no shortage of early adopters.
At least, that's how Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter sees it. The well-known industry analyst has predicted that both PlayStation Move and Microsoft's Kinect will hit 20-25 million combined sales before the end of 2011. However, he also warns that with the emergence of this fancy new hardware, we might see a dip in software sales. Said Pachter:
"Given recent guidance from Microsoft, it is likely that the two peripherals will have an installed base of 8 million by year-end, and depending upon pricing, we could see an installed base that approaches 20–25 million by year-end 2011.
These 20–25 million households are likely to buy 2–3 games apiece, resulting in software sales of 40–75 million units and publisher revenues of $1.6–3 billion next year. These sales are not all incremental; clearly, consumers who buy Kinect or Move are console owners, and presumably, they would have bought other games had they not purchased the peripherals."
Sony has recently revised their announcement of selling 4 million Move units worldwide ; that was a "shipped" number, not a "sold" number. They made a mistake in the press release they distributed. As it stands, the actual sales number is around 2.5 million; Microsoft has stated that Kinect sold over 1 million units in its first five days at retail. Both seem to be off to strong starts, but perhaps it'll be the compatible software lineup that will set them apart in the future…
So, you've got both Move and Kinect at home, right? You're all into supporting this stuff, huh? …okay, maybe it only makes sense to have one or the other.