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Going back over Michael Pachter's track record of "predictions" and "analysis", two things come to mind. A) How many times has he created a bias / bad rap towards an entity within the industry just by pulling stuff out of his ass and B) I can make predictions too, and be right. Hell, I'll do one right now. "Sometime in the near future, someone will try to shove a Wiimote up their rectum." You know there's some nutball freak out there who's going to try it. One of the latest predictions he's pulled out of his crystal ball comes via GamePolitics, where Pachter predicts that BestBuy's new "Retail games at Used prices" plan will fail. I don’t think it will do well. The price match means that Best Buy either cuts their profit per game in half, or wipes it out altogether. I don’t think that they can afford to sell $60 games for $50, and don’t think that it will be effective in the long run. If it does well, then GameStop will cut used game prices to the point where Best Buy can’t match without losing money. So, BestBuy can't afford to lose $10 on the sale of a retail game, a game that's already been marked up to the point where they're going to make a decent profit in the first place. But wait, BestBuy sells more than games, right? Couldn't that $10 lost on the sale of the game be recouped by getting the customer to buy a CD as well? What if they're also tempted into buying a DVD, that's an extra $20 BestBuy wouldn't have gotten if they didn't lure that customer away from GameStop. But what if Gamestop slashes their average retail price for a game by $10, BestBuy's price would go down $10 as well, making a $60 game $40, and leaving an extra $20 in that customer's pocket to buy who knows what. A little increased foot traffic can easily lead to increased impluse buys. Truely, this man is not the Nostradamus of gaming that he wants to be.
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Living the dream since March 16, 2006
You know why he's not the Nostradamus of gaming? because Nostradamus never get paid far out the ass for his predictions.
These publicly available 'predictions' are marketing for his consultancy work which he gets paid pretty damn well for. The guy has carved out a damn good niche, and i say full credit to him.
You don't like him from a gamer point of view. He says stuff and you don't agree with it, and he may not even be right on a fair portion of what he says. But that's not why he is an important figure in the industry.
He is a "tool" for developers to use. His market analysis and "predictions" help give ground for developers to convince publishers to do stuff. What Michael Pachter thinks can help mitigate foreseen risk, and that may help a deemed "risky" project get some wind under its wings.
The whole "risk" part really sucks for a developer, because suits with money =! gamers or developers. All they want is to make sure they get more money back than they spend. But all developers (or the good ones, anyways) want is to make kick ass games for the gamers to play.
Publishers -- Developers -- Gamers. Michael Pachter's importance in the industry is in between Publishers and Developers. The fact he identifies at all to anything on the Gamers side is icing on the cake, whether or not you agree with what he says.
You use the argument that Best Buy can afford to lose some money because of everything else they sell. No they don't. It's a business. They are using this idea because they see it as a viable market plan. They would not be doing this unless they think they can make money. It's also intersting that people don't mention this about Sony. Sony is losing money in the gaming department so the entire company must be doing bad...ohh wait they are involved in pretty much every aspect of electronics...I forgot about that.