14 DAY TRIAL // Video games industry analyst Michael Pachter has once again made a few predictions over the future of the business, right after the NPD group shared its sales data for both the month of December and for the year of 2010 as a whole.
The Xbox 360 was once again riding high in the USA, managing to beat its fiercest rival, the PlayStation 3, by 88% during the holiday months of November and December.
Still, the industry was down as a whole, with Pachter citing things like the fall of music games or the downward trend of Wii and DS software sales, for the poor results.
"We believe that sticky price points for the three major consoles triggered a 5% overall decline in console hardware unit sales for 2010. Handhelds performed even worse, with unit sales down 25%, contributing to continuing software weakness," said the Wedbush Securities analyst.
Pachter then tackled the possibility of new price cuts, and said that it was pretty much a given that platform holders like Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony would slash prices in order to boost sales and access a wider market.
"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% 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," he continued.
Sony is set to have a pretty solid 2011, as it already revealed more than 20 exclusive titles that will be launched for the PlayStation 3, and might also release a new handheld platform, in the form of the PSP2.
As such, a price cut for the its full pledged console might really make people that have yet to buy the device commit to the purchase.
The last PS3 price cut was back in 2009, when the company introduced the redesigned PlayStation 3 Slim model.