Michael Pachter Quotations

We believe that Midway's recent share-price weakness is more attributable to a slow down in purchases by its major shareholder than to a downturn in its business.

We believe that January sales may have been even worse had Microsoft continued its marketing push, and believe that sell through was helped in part by deep discounting of new releases during the month. January marked the fifth consecutive month of software sales decline, and we expect a return to double-digit sales declines in February, with an accelerating rate of decline in March.

One reason they didn't make my number was because they added so much to the reserves.

My guess is they want to sell high- definition discs. You want to get the high-definition monitor owners drooling. It's clever marketing.

Nobody comes in to bid on that. They wait for the body to stop twitching, then swoop down and pick the meat off the carcass.

I don't know where he came up with 20 million,

I am skeptical that we are going to see content that even comes close to harnessing the power of either box for the next several years. It's like using a 3.2 gigahertz PC or a 3.4 gigahertz PC for word processing -- it's not going to make much of a difference.

Given continued uncertainty among consumers about the availability of Xbox 360 units, we think that slow sales may persist in December.

I think they are very close to the edge with the banks. If the business plays out the way I think it will play out, they won't trip the covenants. I think they are not giving themselves enough cushion to weather a downturn and it makes me hesitate in recommending the stock.

I think they are being appropriately conservative about Christmas because it's November 1.

I think the SEC is very likely trying to understand what industry practices are and see if these guys have the potential to manipulate earnings.

... like the health club model, after you pay your 30 bucks a month for 3 or 4 months and you only go once a week, you realize it's not worth it and you split. That's what will happen with Warcraft ,

Most of the press are fixated on video games. They think Sony is only in a battle with Microsoft. Sony is in a battle to make as much money as possible for the privilege of putting entertainment content in a Sony format. They already have a large group of people paying them for video games. They want a large group of studios paying them for movies.

We do not believe that recent weakness will persist, and expect a sales rebound in November and December.

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 are optimistic that Microsoft will remedy the supply-demand imbalance in the U.S. in the next two months, as it appears that recent manufacturing capacity will result in greater unit availability later this month.

The question is, How many of those who didn't buy a 360 in December will now wait for the Sony? Some will.

The fact that we had a positive rental comp means that maybe rental is not dead.

There are many, many things that are happening that are not normal.

There are 5 million people who really believe they are getting an Xbox 360 relatively soon, by February. Microsoft has shipped 500,000 units, so 4.5 million people are doing nothing. That's enough to just kill Christmas.

What everybody needs to understand is Sony is not competing with Microsoft. Sony's competition is with Toshiba.

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

EA has a bunch of underperforming games, and I think that the cuts reflect that. Other publishers will cut underperformers as well.

It was a perfect storm. One could say it was a bad strategy; I would say instead of bad it was a very risky strategy. Essentially, they played blackjack and put a quarter of their money on each hand and busted every time.

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.

It's killing the market. They did a masterful job of marketing the box and an abysmal job of managing the supply chain.

The number of units is a manufacturing constraint. You can't start production from zero and ramp to a million a week.

The number of units is a manufacturing constraint,

Nobody at Take-Two will have the guts to put any hidden sexual content in any game so people are making a bigger deal out of this than is there, ... At the end of the day, the stock is really cheap and the discount makes no sense.

Take-Two is cheap and Atari is really cheap. Investors mistakenly look at the group as either being big and going to thrive or small and going to go broke.

Take-Two has always been a 'trust us' story. We think that Take-Two has become a 'show me' story.

It will limit the success if they're not materially better than the current-generation games. The analogy is, do you buy a new PC if you don't have a reason to? You just don't do it.

They clearly aren't in the big leagues. They're back in the minors now and we'll see if they can build the business back up.

They wouldn't have held a press conference if they didn't have all the components lined up already.

The retailers gives us all products. We need retail.

I want to see the games side by side. I want to see Madden for the Xbox 360 next to Madden for the PlayStation 3.

I'm not impressed. The fact is that they pretty much told you that you're waiting for another year to get paid.

I'm not sure that I appreciate why somebody needs an avatar. The question for these guys is, what do they want to be when they grow up?

In the U.S. they'll sell out at 1.5 million right away. They won't last a week.

I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month. World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers. It may continue to grow in China, but not in Europe or the U.S. We don't need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn't work in the U.S. It just doesn't make any sense.

The earlier movers aren't making a decision between the two.

The company continues to invest in its future, generating large losses along the way, and we expect this to continue throughout 2006.