Michael Pachter: 'PlayStation is Doomed and I think They're Going to Cease to Exist as We Know Them' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 April 2022 / 7,696 Views
Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter in the latest RDX podcast and transcribed by ResetEra was asked about whether Sony can compete with Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass in the long term.
Pachter think PlayStation is "doomed" and they will longer exist as how we know them right now in the next 10 or so years. He believes Microsoft has built up an "insurmountable lead" and Sony is more than a couple of years behind.
"I think PlayStation is doomed and I think they're going to cease to exist as we know them in about ten years," said Pachter. "They can't compete. They have no chance of competing. They're not a couple of years behind, it's an insurmountable lead."
Pachter last month said that Sony's $3.6 billion acquisition of Destiny developer, Bungie, claimed that Sony "vastly overpaid" for the developer. He also expects Sony to keep releasing first-party PlayStation titles as cross-gen releases on the PS5 and PS4 until 2023.
The analyst previously predicted the PlayStation 5 would outsell the Xbox Series X|S with a spilt of 55-45 or 60-40.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
Sony success confirmed for 20 years. Microsoft, you are on notice.
Yeah pretty much. I mean Microsoft lies about Xbox Game Pass being self sustainable. It would take 30 years at double the current subscribers to like break even because of all the aquisitions. Unless Microsoft is actually trying to make a bunch of mobile games in hope of fleecing people out of their money for almost nothing in return.
But the problem is the market is becoming over saturated. They don't do well branching out into different things. For example Viva Pinata. Not an amazing game. Halo probably won't translate well to Gacha mechanics. Forza won't be the game probably that they wanted. Kinect an utter failure. They didn't do crap with Rare games, all their games are in development hell, Halo Infinite is a disaster, the engine they made for Halo is so limited that they can't do the things they plan to do with it or in other games on it and they rotate developers to come in and do some programming for 6 months and then hire a new group, and each of these groups have to learn their freaking engine!
I don't know how they plan to move games away from Playstation, cutting off sales, cannibalizing their own profits by decreasing how many people buy games, I mean $60-120 a year for $300 worth of games sounds great to the gamer, but eventually corners on games have to be cut, and they'll be rushed out buggy messes, cause they are gonna give away 8 million copies and sell 2 million.
Probably the same analyst who predicted console gaming is doomed and mobile gaming will take over the world 10-15 years ago.
SO FUCKING STUPID!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah he spelled Microsoft wrong.
He's an analyst. Shouldn't he be able to tell that other than the tax write offs they get from dumping a truck load of cash constantly it's not sustainable to like give away $300 worth of games for $60 a month when games cost 20+ billion to make? If you only sell 3-4 million copies of the game it's gonna be hard to make back that money. Maybe you can get up to 10-15 on Elder Scrolls because of the PC community but cutting out 10-15 million playstation gamers isn't going to benefit them.
I know here one day the consoles will be gone but im sure there will be a PlayStation connect or online, Sony has to many big titles for the brand to disappear
I thought he only said stupid thing about Nintendo?
No opportunity will be missed.
Time to invest in Sony. They will clearly be around and healthy for decades to come. Thanks, reverse barometer also known as Pachter!
They say even a broken clock is right twice a day. But I would say he is a working clock but with defect that can never be correct (like every hour it gets one minute delay).
Maybe Pachter is a secret genius? His crazy hot takes are the reason we constantly discuss him: better to be infamous than to be unknown perhaps?
If that brings him money sure. He is likely making more than most of us.
I think this is taken a bit out of context based on my other reading about this. But, that said, I agree that the PlayStation business is going to look a whole lot different a decade from now. Everybody in the gaming business, with the possible exception of Nintendo, is going to look very different.
I also agree that Microsoft has a gigantic lead over Sony in the game streaming business. They have a gigantic lead over everybody. Insurmountable, at least in the 10-year term that he's talking about, is probably a good word for it. But I don't know that streaming is the only path forward for gaming. Gaming is interactive, so you can't get a one-to-one comparison with the movie and television industry.
Gaming is more reliant on the hardware it’s being played on than TV and movies. Those media are simple playing back something that was already pre-recorded.
10 years may change it but yes I don't think we will lose dedicated hardware in this timeframe. At least I intend to keep buying PS HW.
I don’t think he’s factoring brand loyalty & recognition into this.
Or like fun cool new shit like Horizon and God of War remakes and I dunno maybe a Sly Cooper game we can hope, and Spiderman... Versus like ANOTHER Halo. ANOTHER Gears of War. ANOTHER Forza. Crackdown 4.
Oh and just you know selling 3-20 million copies of a game when you usually would have sold 7-50 million copies of a game, is gonna work out real well when all you get is $60 for that game and like 6 other new releases, plus all the other games people can't buy. I don't see how gaming budgets won't suffer and games won't come out broken and bad at Microsoft.
Especially since their current games are already in development hell because of how they develop games using their specific engine which doesn't even work for Live Service games properly, and they have short contracts on 3rd party contractor devs, so they have to learn that engine every time a new team is brought in.
$60 a pop is eventually not going to cut it
Ten years?
Who even knows what video games are in ten years?
Of course PlayStation will be something different from "how we know them" by then.
That Microsoft will be the ones taking their cake is very hard to believe, however.
This guys is wrong about 99% of the stuff related to video games the comes out of his mouth. Yet his statements are always plastered over this and other related sites clearly it is not base on his ability to predict what is gonna happen in the future.
We love to hate him.
Looks like the Pach-Man is back. Remember his hot takes from the PSWii60 era being posted here on VGC?
“I need the shittiest take you have.” (Beat) “No, that’s too shitty…”
If Sony releases an HD version of the PS5 in the next two years, they will surely be saved! /s
HAHAHAHAHA This dude is something else. How absurd! Wow...
What a load of rubbish.
All companies will cease to exist as we know it. In 30-50 years gaming will be different, will be all cloud based probably, maybe all VR based. One thing is for sure, nothing ever stays the same, gaming as we know it today is vastly different from 30 years ago when gamers didn't game online on consoles, and digital was not even a thing.
Same person said psp will be a failure, Xbox one x will significantly sell more than PlayStation 4 pro,
In context it sounds like he’s predicting they become a software publisher primarily rather than a console manufacturer.
10 years is aggressive but that’s not a horrible prediction. Not because the PlayStation brand is weak but because I have skepticism that the non-Nintendo console business model can continue into the coming decades. This will be especially true if governments force the storefronts open
If they didn't force apple to open their storefronts they wont force anyone else. People have had skepticism about the console market being dead for a while but it's only growing. It's not going to die in the next 10 years that is the craziest prediction I've ever seen.
People have been predicting consoleDOOOOM almost as long as they’ve been predicting NintenDOOOOOM.
I do remember going back at least 10 years ago with doom spell for console (because PS360 era didn't see growth except for casuals of Wii, then mid gen we had constant nintendoom)
I'm old enough to remember the 1983 crash in the US. Video games were called the "pet rock" of the early 80s. I also remember that CD-ROM drives, Myst, and The 7th Guest were supposed to kill the console gaming market.
I played around that time, but sure I wasnt that aware of the doomed like Im now.
Sega, your table is ready.
Long live to Sony... will Patcher's defenders come along?
He has defenders?
He's an interesting guy when you see him do his analysis work in action in the few web series people have been producing, and he's pretty damn friendly.
Doesn't make him more correct.
But, his job isn't really to be correct. His job is to summarize current financial developments in the game industry for generating standard projections that investors seem to trust.
Unfortunately anyone famous will have fandom that defend to great extents.
He's actually a pretty nice guy on a personal level. He's well aware that a lot of gamers think he puts out a lot of shit takes.
Pachter doomed confirmed.
I predict the downfall of humanity in 9 years ?♂️
Such a stupid claim. But Sony would definitely benefit more becoming third partyand publishing their games on PC only. They would save on all the R&D needed for developing the console and out it towards more games.
Which publisher made more profit than Sony in PS4 era?
Oh okay, is that why my thread was removed ?
