14 DAY TRIAL // Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, has taken the rather bold step of authoring a report that takes a look at how the videogaming industry will look in the next ten years.
He believes that Blizzard will get out a World of Starcraft MMO in less than ten years and that the Wii HD will be released, while other videogame consoles will be packing terabytes of storage space in order to accommodate all the downloadable titles that players will have access to.
This might sound rather outlandish at first but skeptics need to keep in mind that ten years ago, the Game Boy was the only handheld available and motion tracking in games was a distant concept.
Pachter is saying that the videogame industry is set to rise by about 7% on average over the next ten years and he predicts that the bulk of the growth will be provided by digital download titles. Patcher points to Grand Theft Auto IV as leading the way on what content delivered online can do.
The analyst stated that “We think that the poster child for this scenario is Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360, a game first sold in physical form, with additional levels sold periodically thereafter through downloads. Notably, after a tepid embrace of its first downloadable 'episode,' Take-Two decided to offer the first and second 'episodes' in a combined physical package, with the two episodes allowing full game play without the purchase of the original GTA IV game disc.”
A World of Starcraft MMO is expected to come before the end of 2011, with Blizzard capitalizing on its biggest videogame franchise, while the Wii will get a hardware upgrade allowing it to show games in Full High Definition before the end of the next year.
Pachter also believes that the recent increases in mobile gaming will not be sustainable and that the in-game advertising market will also have a tough time taking off. The analyst adds that the only big acquisition to arrive in the next years will be linked to Ubisoft.