Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Bill Harris over at DubiousQuality has been charting the PS3′s rocky start and the Wii’s startling success for a while now. He recounts that the PS2 has an installed base of maybe 100 million worldwide, which many of us know full well, and has theorized in the past that with the PS3′s slow start developers and publishers would keep strongly supporting the PS2 for quite a while, maybe another year or two. After all, you write to your biggest market, right?

Wrong.

Bill has taken a look at the upcoming release list for the PS2, and from June 1st to the end of 2007 there will be just ten games. Ten! That’s four from EA, three from THQ, one from Take Two and one from Activision.

What will the installed base be at the end of 2007? Bill ventures a generous 10 million. And with some people buying the PS3 just as a cheap Blu-ray player, maybe not all of those will be game machines.

Now I’ve seen guesses that the 360 will motor along to 25m by the end of the year and that the Wii might hit 10m if the momentum continues. Toss in the 10m conversion of PS2 owners to PS3 owners, you’ve got 90m PS2 owners with basically nothing left to buy in the last half of 2007. That’s 75% of a very vibrant market purchasing nothing, and Bill implies it’s a recipe for a massive implosion in the gaming market.

The flaw in this reasoning is, of course, that nobody knows what those 90 million consumers will do instead of buying nothing for their PS2. Will they buy a Wii? Will they buy a 360? Will they — as Wombat said of some of his friends in a recent CAGcast — decide they’re “done” with gaming after getting their fill of so many great gaming experiences on the PS2 and walk away from the hobby altogether?

My bet is that they’ll buy something new, and the big marketing challenge for Nintendo and Microsoft is to convert PS2 gamers over to their respective consoles. This is all made possible by the utterly improbable situation where the owner of the PlayStation brand hasn’t yet been able to make the PS3 the must-have upgrade for PS2 owners.

Via DubiousQuality. Image from Threadless T-Shirts.