It still feels like an open race in the battle for the consumers of this generation, previously the next-gen, of video game consoles. All three consoles have now arrived, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii have been launched and analysts are continuing to share their views on the outcome. According to Yoshiyuki Kinoshita at Merrill Lynch it will be Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console that will win this generation and the reason is simply Microsoft’s one year advantage.
The Xbox has North America as it primary market and is expected to have about 50% of the video game console market in 2011 when the next generation of consoles is expected to arrive. If you look at the world market things will be a lot tighter, but with a small margin in favor of Microsoft.
“We forecast respective market shares at end-FYQ3/2011 of Xbox 360 at 39%, PS3 @ 34% and Wii @ 27%, thus overturning Sony’s domination of the market with its PS2-based share of 69%, and doubling Microsoft and Nintendo’s respective market shares,”
However, it will take five years before we will know if Microsoft will be able to handle as well as Merrill Lynch claims, and if it does it has been able to perform quite a task as PlayStation 2 slapped the old Xbox silly during the previous generation.
