Malik  (9/02/04)

Make or Break Holliday Season Approaching 

Wedbush Morgan Securities, a financial analyst group has predicted, according to Gamespot.com, that this holiday season will be a time for many companies to either thrive or suffer in the game world. To sum things up, they expect a group of 11 highly anticipated games to far outsell the competition...which will in turn lead to lower sales for the companies not involved with their list of games. In fact, they are expecting over half of the software that will sell this year to be sold in the last 3 months of the year...you may recall Malik here mentioning something like that a couple days ago on my nightly post. 

These games include some of the obvious return franchise favorites; Halo 2, Madden, Gran Tourismo, GTA:SA, etc. Wedbush Morgan Securities is basically expecting all publishers of games that will arrive in the next 3 or so months that are not involved with these specific titles to face some rough times as their games go neglected and ignored as the majority of consumers reach for the in-games. 

Now, as I mentioned before, I've been saying this for the last few days...makes me feel like I would be better off being a game industry analyst since I can see this crap a few days before the real analysts say it. Oh well. However, what this doesn't directly say is how badly it will affect the more "cult" followed of games (like Phantom Brave), which will suffer and their publishers and developers will feel the pinch due to all of this...and we may too, as their games fail and thus they limit production of future titles in the US in a desperate step to overcompensate for a failure in the future. Blah.

For more on this, check out Malik's Bitchings tomorrow...on which I've already finished a piece on this entire deal a couple days ago (but I like a little structure in my life; M's Bs come on Fridays as long as I can help it)...Damn, I'm so good that I start to write the news before it even happens.

Malik