What Lies Ahead - Holiday Season

The battle between the snake, the fitness board and the locust will be waged this holiday season.  How will the Xbox 360 and Marcus Fenix stack up against Sony and Solid Snake?  Will the need to stay in shape reign surpreme over the need to chainsaw?  Will Metal Gear Solid 4 bring home the first win for Sony during the holiday season?  Or will Gears of War 2 provide the “meat” that Microsoft needs to secure another victory?

All three consoles are poised to go into the holiday season without much hype and certainly without anything amazingly new.  Both the Sony and Microsoft camps will rest their faith in big name sequels while Nintendo will continue its normal path of relying on the Nintendo Wii obsession.  What will be interesting is to see which company will sing the “console shortages” story and which of them will sing it first?  In what has become a tough economy to measure, consumers will likely spend less this holiday season than they did last year.

Nintendo has struggled with maintaining its Wii console in stores since launch but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing its lead over both the Xbox 360 and PS3.  They’ll continue this lead even despite the 10 million console sold milestone their competition announced which oddly enough left the Nintendo Wii out of its figures.  Had Nintendo increased its efforts to provide more Wii’s on the market, we might have seen an end to this console race a lot earlier.  I do see the big N leading for the remainder of 2008, but I predict that both the Xbox 360 and PS3 will gain significant ground heading into 2009. 

I see a Q4 2008 that shines compared to the year before for Microsoft which stops what has been a trend since launch.  I expect the supply issue that has plagued Microsoft recently to be addressed.  Most of the consumers that are still playing their original Xbox will finally decide that there is an affordable reason to jump in to the Xbox 360 with the price cut.  It’s important to Microsoft to build a loyal userbase going into the next-generation because they can’t afford to have the same thing take place from Xbox 360 to Xbox 720 as it did from the original Xbox to Xbox 360.  So I believe they ride the momentum of a price cut into a close second place finish this holiday season behind Nintendo.

Not having a Grand Theft Auto IV exclusive window and losing out on episodic content this Fall will hurt Sony but not as much as its competitors would like.  The big surprise is that Sony will move more hardware than the Xbox 360 initially following the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.  Despite the dual launch of the game, it’s still very much seen as a Sony title having started its craze from the PlayStation brand.  This will prove an important perception when talking about how much hardware GTAIV pushes.

Will the surge plus the value in the Metal Gear Solid 4 PS3 bundle be enough to secure more than another 3rd place finish for Sony by year’s end?  MGS4 will put up good numbers but fighting a battle alone against Ninja Gaiden 2, exclusive GTA IV content and Gears of War 2 may end up being too much to handle.  It would be a large task for anyone. 

Will PlayStation Home be released and blooming by year’s end?  I think so and the landscape may change and there may be a real battle this holiday for #2.  But that remains to be seen.

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