Professional guesser extraordinaire Michael Pachter has said some silly things in the past, but no matter how frequently his prophesies get called out after the fact, the Wedbush Morgan analyst rarely publicly acknowledges any miscalculations on his part. Hindsight’s 20/20, of course, but even Pachter himself looked back at his recent $50 Natal prediction and thought it sounded a bit off.
“I probably aimed too low with my $50 Natal comment, as I’m sure that consumers will come to believe that the product and software has a lot of value. That means to me that Microsoft may try to price higher than I guessed on the Pach Attack segment,” Pachter reasoned in an interview with Industry Gamers. “Regardless, if consumers think that Microsoft is providing a lot of value with Natal, it could be priced higher.”
With that out of the way, how does Pachter think the latest motion control options will affect the market? Pachter explains what he thinks will go down:
“The more they and Sony charge, the lower unit sales of the competing controllers will be, and the less they charge, the higher. I don’t see either expanding the GAMING audience, but do see them expanding the user base beyond the core gamer in the household. I do not expect the multi-user household to buy a significantly higher number of games, but think that once these other household members are introduced to the PS3 and 360, they may begin to enjoy the many features of each, and are more likely to justify movie downloads, joining Netflix, or whatever is planned in the future, as the consoles are more approachable with motion controls.”