The start of a new year is always fun. There's plenty to look forward to, especially in the video game industry. Analysts love to make predictions, so IndustryGamers decided to ask a few leading game analysts to give us their top five predictions. Here's what they said after gazing into the crystal ball.
Jesse Divnich, EEDAR
1. Dance games will see a revival in sales in 2010. This will be mostly due to the Project Natal and Sony Motion Controller, which will allow for publishers to evolve the Dance genre. Let's face it, people love to dance, whether with others or by yourself (we are all guilty of doing a solo Hammer Time Dance) and the idea of replicating history's most famous dance steps as well as new ones will have a mainstream appeal. It is just a matter of a publisher actually making the game, with good licenses, and strong marketing. Oh, and they will have to get Ellen to promote it on her show--she loves to dance.
2. A sequel to the DS will either launch in late 2010 or be announced for early 2011.
3. We've been hearing a lot about 3D Gaming at CES, but once the show is over, so will the chatter about 3D Gaming. Sorry folks, it's not happening this generation.
4. Music will be down 40% (just Music, not Dance). I made the same prediction last year and it worked out. Let's go for double or nothing.
5. Excluding the DS, there will be more downloadable games released in 2010 than physical releases.
David Cole, DFC Intelligence
1. Motion control hardware add-ons are released and create new buzz and excitement around the industry.
2. A major new hardware announcement from one of the big players gives journalists something new to write about.
3. One or more significant medium-sized public game companies are bought up because of financial struggles.
4. The inevitable march towards digital distribution and cloud gaming continues, but gamers are hardly aware of the shift as they just rush to get the new Blizzard products any way they can.
5. A cool down in the social gaming hype as it is clear that monetization is still a challenge.
Colin Sebastian, Lazard Capital Markets
1. Project Natal ships on-time for the holidays with multi-million unit sales.
2. Social game market continues rapid growth and expands beyond Facebook and MySpace to include browsers and smartphones.
3. Cloud gaming finally goes live and begins to ramp off of a small consumer base.
4. The industry will begin to embrace 3D games following on the popularity of 3D movies and sales of 3D TV sets.
5. Google becomes more active in the video game market - using YouTube and Android as distribution platforms.
7 Comments
8 months ago
My prediction for 2010:
Colin Sebastian needs to look for a new job.
8 months ago
@innerloop
Thank you sir, you made my day.
8 months ago
My predictions for 2010 include the PS3 outselling the Wii in Japan by at least 1 million units for the year following the release of Gran Turismo 5 and the new motion controller. The PS3 will also continue to shorten the gap between itself and the 360. By the end of the year the 360 will only have a 1.5 million lead or less worldwide over the PS3. Wii hardware sales will also continue to decline year - on - year.
Project Natal will fall flat on it's face due to the amount of lag the system has.
The 2 best - selling games of the year will be Gran Turismo 5 and Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver.
Because of Sony and Microsoft's move into the casual gaming space, Nintendo will be forced to up the quality of their software or risk becoming obsolete this generation. It is likely that a Wii 2 will come out before a PS4 or Xbox 720, however there's no way the Wii 2 will see the sales success of the original.
8 months ago
Fan-freaking-tastic post Innerloop, I literally lol'd in my cubicle.
1) 3D gaming is still far off and won't be on the horizon until 3D capable TV's are economically available (read: cheap) to the masses.
2) Natal will flop.
3) (And I'm praying to God on this one) Farmville and other proto-games like it die a quick and extremely painful death.
4) The Wii will still sucker people in under its guise of fun and well constructed games only to disappoint everyone who buys them.
8 months ago
A few of my predictions for 2010:
1. 3D gaming will fail to ever take off because only Sony is trying to push it due to their 3D enabled tvs
2. Natal will be the hot new project for xmas 2010, although sales will cool down in 2011
3. People will finally stop buying the Wii in droves like it's the last water supply in an everlasting desert
4. DLC will continue to increase revenues for companies but will still in no way replace physical disc media
5. Bobby Kotisk will continue to make ridiculously stupid ass comments that Activision Blizzards PR people myteriously allow to be printed
8 months ago
My Predictions:
1) A Year of sequels. Yeah, OK, not exactly earth shattering. But just about every successful game will be a sequel.
2) 3D will become a big success . . . but not in 2010. It will barely register on the radar in 2010.
3) Digital distribution will continue to grow. XLBA, N's Virtual console, PSN, Steam, and others will all continue to grow. Reduced distribution costs and reduced piracy will make it attractive such that publishers/developers will actually lower prices on digital distributed products to make them more popular.
4) The Wii will continue to decline a bit. HDTV penetration is making people want HD consoles. And how many mini-game compilations and exercise 'games' can you buy?
5) The over-hype of social gaming will cool a bit. People like something that is free? Who would have guessed? Now show us a business model that isn't based on fraudulent ads.
3 months ago
MTR Gaming Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:MNTG) has the 1st highest upside potential in this segment of the market. Its upside is 173.2%. Its consensus target price is $5.00 based on the average of all estimates.
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