Vlad over at Joystiq has
been spending some time at the Games Marketing Conference in San Francisco--no doubt a maelstrom of hip buzzwords and
rapidly revolving smooth talkers. That cleverly brings us to some choice Revolution quotes which emanated from the
mouth of one Michael Pachter, managing director of research at Wedbush Morgan Securities. After pointing out the foolishness of some people who have already written off the Revolution, Pachter indicated that the console would find itself sitting alongside the Xbox 360 or the PS3 in a gamer's entertainment stand, acting as a "second choice" rather than a primary machine. With the Revolution's final price generally believed to be comparitively low, it's not an unusual claim to make. This claim is backed up by the suggestion that the Xbox 360 and PS3 will have few exclusives between them, with the "big" next-gen titles such as Grand Theft Auto being spread across both platforms. This, in turn, would encourage gamers to skip over either the Xbox 360 or PS3 and pick up a Revolution instead.
With rising development costs, it would seem only natural for developers to seek maximum exposure for their latest games, but we don't think exclusives are in any danger of dwindling. As the graphical capabilities of both Microsoft and Sony will be roughly in the same league, we'd say that exclusive titles between the two could become even more important than before. Pachter also (narrow-mindedly) added that "Microsoft has one game now: it's Halo, and everything else sucks." Despite writing on a blog called Revolution Fanboy, even we know that the Xbox doesn't begin and end with just Halo.
We agree with Pachter's vision of where the Revolution will end up, but prefer to think that such success will be due to the strengths of the console (low price and innovative games) and not the failures of the competition.
