Michael Pachter Dramatic Quotations

The year's a mess. None of us thought six months ago the holidays would be so weak, and no one expected there'd be such a dramatic decline in sales for the current-generation of games.

We expect a price cut for the PS2 later this year. We believe that Sony will respond to Microsoft's introduction of its next generation console with a cut from $149 to $99 some time before the November 22 Xbox 360 launch, ... We think that Sony has positioned itself to lower price by reducing the production costs of its console when it redesigned the box to a smaller format... Should Sony choose to discount the PS2 to $129 or even $99, we would expect a dramatic lift in PS2 hardware sales, and a corresponding lift in PS2 software sales. Our model forecasts that Sony PS2 hardware sales will be 1.8 million units higher this year compared to last year.

We expect modest growth in November and dramatic growth in December,