{"id":9415,"date":"2011-01-17T00:02:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T22:02:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"analyst-console-prices-will-drop-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/9415-analyst-console-prices-will-drop-this-year","title":{"rendered":"Analyst: console prices will drop this year"},"content":{"rendered":"

Industry analyst Michael Pachter has meditated on the state of console pricing, consulted his spirit guides, and announced that a drop is due sometime this year. I’m sure the previous year-to-year console price drops were not an informing factor in this otherwise 100% divine revelation. <\/p>\n

According to Pachter, the 20 percent decline in the (over-saturated, underwhelmed) music genre and (mostly shovelware) Nintendo software sales were due, at least in part, to “stubborn hardware price points”.<\/p>\n

“We believe that sticky price points for the three major consoles triggered a 5 percent overall decline in console hardware unit sales for 2010,” he told IndustryGamers<\/a>, in response to the December NPD results released last week. “Handhelds performed even worse, with unit sales down 25 percent, contributing to continuing software weakness.”<\/p>\n

The December NPDs<\/a> – which also included information for the entire year – showed a bit of an industry slump, with only the Xbox 360 banging out an improvement on 2009. <\/p>\n

Pachter added that the PS3 is probably going to get cheaper first.<\/p>\n

“We fully expect each of the three consoles to be offered at lower prices in 2011, with Sony likely leading the way as its manufacturing costs continue to decline. A $50 price cut should be sufficient to drive 5 percent software sales growth; and, coupled with a resurgence in handheld software sales and an easy comparison for music sales, we think that overall software sales growth could hit low double digits in 2011.”<\/p>\n

Discuss possible console price cuts in 2011<\/a> in the forums<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Also predicts sun is likely to turn up in the morning, vanish at night<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}