Reuters reports on big game franchises and their ability to drive both software and hardware sales during the holiday shopping season. According to the news service, likely sales winners this winter will be Final Fantasy XII (PS2), Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii/GC), and Gears of War (360) with no mention of the anticipated Resistance Fall of Man (PS3). The piece also suggests that Epic's Gears could potentially have the same effect on the 360 as Halo 2 did for the original Xbox raking in $125 million in first day sales.From the article: "But with only a limited number of the new consoles available in stores at their launch in November, the biggest payoff for game makers is likely to be software designed for older machines already in tens of millions of homes ... U.S. video game makers, strong contributors to the industry's $30 billion in overall revenue estimated for 2006, reap more than half of their sales during the holiday season."
Should be entertaining to see how it all goes down in a few months. Which leads to the next topic of discussion: How important, if at all, is this holiday season in predicting each console's potential over the next five years?
