The 2007 Bold Predictions

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IMAGE(http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/files/images/nostradacertis1.jpg)

After referencing my last batch of bold predictions a couple weeks ago, I was both praised for my amazing foresight and derided for making obvious predictions that anyone could have called. Well guess what boys and girls? You didn't and I did. That makes me the bold knight, galloping into the future and you the scared little squire, hiding behind a rock and making catcalls. Maybe this year some of you heckling from the cheap seats will step up and make your own predictions. We'll see who gets to wear the funny hat when the dust clears on 2007. My first prediction? It will be me.

- The PS3 price will drop faster than the PS2 did in North America. Even sooner in Japan. A $50 price drop on both models by the end of the year.

- The Xbox 360 will refresh the premium model with a larger hard-drive and new ports. Two SKUs will continue in the market. The "core" pack will remain without a hard-drive or HDMI port as Microsoft pushes the price for entry to the Xbox 360 lower. No price drops this year, expect more value-add bundles.

- The Nintendo Wii will continue to sell well and gain ground on the Xbox 360 sale numbers, coming within 1 million by the end of the year. Game releases will trickle through to March with the new Metroid leading the second wave of AAA releases. Mario Galaxies will come out around Christmas. No price drops or new models of the Wii will happen this year.

- Windows Vista will be essential for gamers by next Christmas. PC game stability will improve and graphics capabilities will surpass the console by the end of the year.

- Supreme Commander (PC) will gain critical praise from RTS fans and remind us how poor the market for hardcore RTS games is. Command and Conquer 3 (PC, 360) will do much, much better thanks to a more casual approach and KANE.

- Master Chief will not remove his helmet in Halo 3. If he does, you still won't see his face.

- The Vanguard launch will be a catastrophe, adding to the stable of games SOE has destroyed with crappy launches before they even get a chance to gain an audience.

- The PS3 will suffer from a weak release list until March, redeeming itself with an aggressive push for large, downloadable games. Tekken 5 and Gran Turismo HD are just the beginning.

- There will be a PSP refresh this year, much like the DS Lite. UMD support will remain, but a built-in hard-drive will drive users toward downloaded software straight to the PSP -- without needing a PS3 or PC to facilitate the transfer. The form factor will shrink, the screen will support touch functionality and battery life will improve.

- Age of Conan will bring the MMORPG genre as close to "3rd generation design" as we've seen so far. It will be a system hog and the single player mode will fall short of what we expect from Funcom, but it will gain a profitable following.

- Guitar Hero will not move systems for the Xbox 360 like it does the PS2. Excitement and sales surrounding the series will cool on all systems.

- Grand Theft Auto IV will be delayed until next year. A rare occurrence for Rockstar.

- Metal Gear Solid IV will rock your socks "… on the PS3 first with the Xbox 360 following six months later.

- Crysis will look good, but the gameplay will come up short after four hours.

- Alan Wake? Not this year.

- Video game conventions will sprout like mushrooms, spreading fan attention thin and leaving the big companies doing their own events. Smaller publishers and developers will look for more online momentum than ever before.

- Sony will lean on the PS2 with a stronger release list than expected this year as the PS3 gains traction. The PS3 will remain locked in 3rd through to 2008.

- Bill Harris will be hired as an image consultant for Sony, but only because they beat Electronic Arts to the punch.

We'll dig up the time capsule late this year to revel in my brilliance. Got any predictions of your own? Now is the time to sound off! I'll get the shovel.

Comments

Rat Boy wrote:

- Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 will be a disappointment if it brings back the helicoptor gunner stages.

Or the stages where they send you on a mission of vital national security, but make you do so without your squad for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah, and your Cross-Com isn't available. And all the enemies are a perfect shot.

Certis wrote:
- Dragon Age will continue to mock Certis by continuing to exist.

- As an addendum to Certis' Vanguard prediction, Vanguard will be a colossal failure. It'll drag down Perpetual Entertainment and kill the only other project they had running that might have been a better MMORPG: Star Trek Online.

Too bad Sigil is making Vanguard, huh? Too bad I WIN and you just forfeit the right to bring up Dragon Age ever again. Woo! :hump:

Yup. The Perpetual game you are thinking of is Age of Heroes, a Roman mythology themed MMO. Judging from what my friend who worked there until their wave of layoffs a couple months ago has told me, you may be right though. Although their concept for AoH seems great, it will probably end up beeing too much of a WoW clone with new skin for it to really work out.

Rat Boy wrote:

- This will be the year that WoW peaks. It's all downhill from here.

As far as the thinking gamer is concerned, it peaked about a week before it came out of beta, since everyone already had pleanty of time to figure out how to munchkin their characters to the point where RP was a fool's dream.
/flameBait

* Metal Gear Solid 4 on the Wii before Xbox 360

* Steam begins selling movies online

* Duke Nukem Forever wins Vaporware of the year again

and Parallax Abstraction will tell everyone to avoid them until Microsoft fixes The Broken Xbox Live Marketplace.

I'm fairly certain I agreed to help you on your crusade: Providing I'm still allowed to buy content I like. BUT I WON'T BE HAPPY ABOUT IT MICROSOFT!

I challenge you to not purchase Worms when it's released. I'd like to be there at the moment your will is crushed

Another Prediction:

Multiplayer In-game advertising will be recognized as ineffective. Standard in-game advertising (such as Rainbow 6: Vegas, Swat 4) will take off. Game prices will not be affected.

I'm thinking that despite a piss poor lineup, Sony's insertion of Bluray drives into homes will barely succeed. By the end of the year Bluray will look to be the HD format of choice. The very next day Microsoft will release numbers regarding sales of HD movies and shows over Live. Sony will collectively adopt the facial expression of Phillip T. Eskwell, inventor of the longer lasting candle circa 1920.

The Crysis prediction is pretty weak, but the sage Certis images more than makes up for it. I don't think FarCry was originally made to sell the engine, but to sell videocards. Evidence A: All the games made using the CryEngine.

EDIT: Didn't the Master Chief prediction already happen in the first game?

Halo 3 will still not have a satisfying ending.

Bioshock will be the buzz word after release for about a month or so, until the next pretty comes out.

Huxley will be revolutionary with its implementation of a FPS and an MMO.

Vista won't be the OS that you think it will be.

zeroKFE wrote:

Yup. The Perpetual game you are thinking of is Age of Heroes, a Roman mythology themed MMO. Judging from what my friend who worked there until their wave of layoffs a couple months ago has told me, you may be right though. Although their concept for AoH seems great, it will probably end up beeing too much of a WoW clone with new skin for it to really work out.

Actually, it's Gods and Heroes, and in spite of the layoffs, the company's co-founder is still all smiles. So there!

IMAGE(http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/3028/gjwimqg2.jpg)

"There is no Dragon Age coming out. Never!"

cartoonin99 wrote:

Vista won't be the OS that you think it will be.

Oh be nice. Instead of just plain old background images, we will now have background *movies* that actually move, making it *impossible* to get any work done and forcing administrators everywhere to figure out how to turn this off in order to not get calls from users asking why their computers are so slow.

My versions of Certis's predictions:

The Nintendo Wii will continue to sell well and gain ground on the Xbox 360 sale numbers, coming within 1 million by the end of the year. Game releases will trickle through to March with the new Metroid leading the second wave of AAA releases. Mario Galaxies will come out around Christmas. No price drops or new models of the Wii will happen this year.

Sony's statement about Wii being a "distraction" while Xbox and PS3 will be the "serious" consoles will actually prove to be correct, as Wii will follow the same road as the DS.

There will not be a definite draught of titles, but it will be flooded with cartoonish, childish looking games, many of which will use the remote just because it is there. The likes of Metroid will be a rare exception to this rule. There will be quality, polished games like Mario Kart, however they will still be either beaten-into-ground Nintendo franchises and mascots and/or cartoonish bug-eyed and/or anime kid-oriented themes.

The Wii will lack in gritty titles, new interesting franchises, and combinations of both.

- Windows Vista will be essential for gamers by next Christmas. PC game stability will improve and graphics capabilities will surpass the console by the end of the year.

Initial DirectX10 performance claims will prove to be wildly overhyped; the performance increase will come from the new generation videocards, and not so much from "rewritting DirectX paths".

Vista will not have "games" for it. By next Xmas there will be 1 (one) game which will be Vista-exclusive, due to developer's fear of slow adoption rate, which will be well justified.

- There will be a PSP refresh this year, much like the DS Lite. UMD support will remain, but a built-in hard-drive will drive users toward downloaded software straight to the PSP -- without needing a PS3 or PC to facilitate the transfer. The form factor will shrink, the screen will support touch functionality and battery life will improve.

The PSP revision will not have the touchscreen. It will not have a hard drive. It will come with a much larger memory card (4-8gb).

There will be more AAA PSP titles coming out and the PSP will gain more popularity through this revision, which will be even sleeker and marginally lighter to the touch. Battery life will be improved twofold.

The PSP will also further gain popularity at the expense of Nintendo DS, which will continue being flooded mostly with rather cartoonish, primitive child-oriented titles which will revolve around Mario and/or Kirby platform jumping, item collecting and pixel hunting.

- The PS3 will suffer from a weak release list until March, redeeming itself with an aggressive push for large, downloadable games. Tekken 5 and Gran Turismo HD are just the beginning.

PS3 will be successful, but not because of downloadable games, but because of the Wii not capitalizing on the market for non-kiddie games (as mentioned earlier). Downloadable games for PS3 will not gain significant popularity as most people prefer to have a box they can hold in their hands. Also, the games will take a lot of HD space - there will be a large download, and then the unpacked game itself. The HD space will already be eaten at by addon packs and patches of existing games.

The Wii download titles will be somewhat popular because they're cheap, retro and small. They can be redownloaded quickly at any time.

The PS3 will remain locked in 3rd through to 2008.

It may however trade places with Wii before March 2008. There will be some PS3 exclusive killer app title that will lift it sharply, much like when people were laughing about the 1st XBox and then they, like, stopped laughing. This title will come out in the last quarter of the year.

Swat wrote:

- Every other MMO, albeit the new breed of Action/RPG/MMOs will flop in the face of WoW. Expect a brief period of over-excitement followed by many saying "well, back to WoW"

Warhammer Online will sway an overwhelmingly larger portion of players away from WoW than any other MMO in 2006 or 2007. It will have just enough new and interesting features to make people take notice.

And, more predictions:

Hellgate London will not come out in 2007. There may be a closed beta test at the end of the year.

STALKER development team will visit a nuclear plant in Tver to create the last, climactic level of their game. Due to highly unfortunate timing, the plant will melt down, killing all but one person.

Diablo 3 will be exposed in form of teasers and screenshots. It will be locked into direct competition with Hellgate London.

Duke Nukem Forever will come out. It will be a well-made FPS, however the lack of cooperative play will cause an outrage amongst the surviving Duke veterans, some of whom will throw their walkers into 3DRealms office windows. George Broussard will be unavailable for comment at the time, as he will be on his way to Tver to help Russians install a nuclear reactor.

- The Xbox 360 will refresh both SKUs with an HDMI port and the "premium" version will also get a larger hard-drive. The "core" pack instead will drop in price by $50 and replace the wired controller with the wireless version.

- Sony will not drop the PS3 prices going into the holidays, instead bundling Spider-Man 3 with both models and adding an HDMI cable to the 60GB version.

- The PSP will see a $20 price drop and come bundled with a 1GB memory card and a coupon for a free PS1 game download. Hard drive rumors will persist but yield nothing.

- Microsoft will introduce the ability to use any attached USB hard drive for music and video storage with the Xbox 360. It will require formatting the drive specifically for the '360 and cost 4000 points.

- The Wii will show strong hardware sales but weak software sales apart from its Virtual Console selection and anything touched by Nintendo. Ports will be the order of the day throughout 2007 with original titles pushed into 2008.

- Samba de Amigo for the Wii will be announced.

- Windows Vista will not become the dominant operating system in 2007 as piracy and demand for support from corporate customers keeps XP going.

- The Games for Windows initiative will not affect sales with EA and MMO publishers notably refusing to play along.

- A surprisingly complete Starcraft 2 will be announced in the Fall with a late 2008 release date.

- Fervor for Guitar Hero will cool as the song list for the third installment proves underwhelming. Rumors of Sitar Hero will prove to be false.

I am pulling these out of my tin foiled cover ass.(don't wanna be probed by aliens you know)

Auto Assault will go the way of Guild wars and be free to play.

Master Chief will remove his helmet and reveal he is a cyborg, but the game will end with his possible death.

Microsoft will add a new feature for adults and start offering porn movies.

At the end of 2007 one of the Big 3 will call it quits and pull a sega and only make games.

Disapointingly still no Halo movie, but a cgi cartoon series will apear

Namco will make a MMO fighting game.

Eberron will be an expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2

Sadly this will be possible due to DDO floundering

Sega having felt the pinch from EA sportswise, and Sonic not doing well will once again develop a console.

shihonage wrote:

Hellgate London will not come out in 2007. There may be a closed beta test at the end of the year.

Wrong already! However, to add to my list of predictions, Hellgate: London will be the PC game of the summer, however it'll just be that, the game of summer. People will move on to newer, shinier things while Hellgate's remembered for being this year's flash-in-the-pan. Kind of like NWN2, but with oogaba.

Windows Vista will be essential for gamers by next Christmas.

That's the one I doubt. Other than a few selected titles, the majority of the games still will run on XP. The mass market simply doesn't adapt that fast. Just remember how long it it took until publishers finally stopped supporting Win9x and, more recently, 2K. The user base is simply too huge to be ignored. And it'll take a while for true DX10 titles to show up.

UMD support will remain, but a built-in hard-drive will drive users toward downloaded software straight to the PSP -- without needing a PS3 or PC to facilitate the transfer.

About 6 months ago I heard that Sony's heavily 'interested' in all kinds of 1.8-inch harddisks. There might be some reason other than MP3 players... ^^

cartoonin99 wrote:

Vista won't be the OS that you think it will be.

Obi Wan wrote:

This is not the OS you're looking for....

No predictions that more Sony batteries will explode?

Vista will shatter sales records in 2007 and be proclaimed Microsoft most successful product launch. Fanboys will scream that its because a Vista license is sold with every OEM PC and not because people actually bought it.

No one will care and these fanboys will be shunned.

I will laugh.

Rat Boy wrote:

Wrong already!

Are you fully aware of the fact that you're linking to a release date announcement, my young padawan ?

Fanboys will scream that its because M$ Suxxorz and not because people actually bought it.

Fixed.

shihonage wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Wrong already!

Are you fully aware of the fact that you're linking to a release date announcement, my young padawan ?

Funny, you said it wasn't coming out in 2007, that says it does. I believe the circle is now complete.

- Microsoft will announce Gears of War 2 as their 360 killer app for Christmas '08.

- Blizzard will announce Starcraft 2.

- Once production is up to capacity, the PS 3 will outsell the 360 until the day Halo 3 is released. Then it's anybody's game.

- The 2 biggest *multiplayer* games at GWJ, ie, the games we play together the most, will be Halo 3 and Hellgate.

- Crysis will be a great game.

[quote=Certis]Windows Vista will be essential for gamers by the release of Crysis.[quote]

For Vista to become essential to gamers, it needs a killer app. This is my real prediction - Crysis won't be the Vista killer app, neither will Shadowrun. We'll needa game that requires Vista to look it's best, not to look 5% better. Vista probably won't be essential until 2008.

Master Chief will not remove his helmet in Halo 3. If he does, you still won't see his face.

Brilliant! You predict that he both will and will not remove his helmet. You are right (and wrong) no matter what happens.

Release dates tend to play the slippery eel, Rat Boy.

Rat Boy wrote:

Funny, you said it wasn't coming out in 2007, that says it does. I believe the circle is now complete.

All right, so according to Rat Boy, no one should be allowed to make predictions that a game will NOT come out in 2007 if there's been a press release announcing that it will. That make sense to anyone ?

The prediction is about whether a game COMES OUT, not whether "the publisher will promise that it will come out". So, my prediction will be invalid when the game is in EB Games/Amazon in 2007, and no earlier than that.

- Microsoft will introduce the ability to use any attached USB hard drive for music and video storage with the Xbox 360. It will require formatting the drive specifically for the '360 and cost 4000 points.

God, I hope this happens. Their IPTV announcement intrigues me, but I do NOT want to have to try to swap out my hard drive for a larger one, let alone buy a new Xbox to take advantage of it.

So, my own thoughts:

--- Vista will be far less succesful in the Home/Gaming market than predicted (Reasoning -- I've played with Media Center Vista, one of the only apps I know that taxes the video subsystems. It simply will not run on hardware a year old. This implies a complete machine refresh for most gamers. I'm massively projecting out of my ass here, based on limited information and experience.)

--- Wii will have minimal online multiplayer content (reasoning -- lack of voice support, and a design focussed entirely on in-person multiplayer from the start.)

--- Gaming journalism will start being taken seriously. (By this I mean, just as seriously as mainstream movie journalism, which means 'ha ha ha, look at those pathetic hollywood pimps').

--- Gaming finance will start being taken seriously. (By this I mean that it will become far less of a footnote to MSFT's and Sony's 10ks, and will start becoming a primary point of analysis.)

--- The PSP will fail to gain market share.

--- Guitar Hero for 360, while not a massive system mover, will sell tons and will rock your world with XBM content.

--- Gears will replace Halo2 as the default "pro" gaming application.

--- Settlers of Catan will become the best selling XBLA game to date, and will be credited with moving 100k+ Xboxen in Europe.

shihonage wrote:

All right, so according to Rat Boy, no one should be allowed to make predictions that a game will NOT come out in 2007 if there's been a press release announcing that it will. That make sense to anyone ?

Then you might as well predict then that the PS3 will tank and Sony's gaming division will fold, too, since the odds of Hellgate completely falling out of 2007 are just as good.

I'd prefer letting me save things onto my computer via the steaming setup. The Zune software is already one of the ways to stream (also WMP), so it couldn't be that hard to do.

What I'd really like: Faster file browsing on the 360 of files on the PC. I've given up playing any music that I didn't just save into a playlist first on my PC.

Windows Vista will be essential for gamers by the release of Crysis.

Well, Crysis is being heavily marketed as part of Microsoft's Games for Windows program - but people not talking about an XP version doesn't automatically mean it's not being made despite what the marketing monkeys say.

Rat Boy wrote:
shihonage wrote:

All right, so according to Rat Boy, no one should be allowed to make predictions that a game will NOT come out in 2007 if there's been a press release announcing that it will. That make sense to anyone ?

Then you might as well predict then that the PS3 will tank and Sony's gaming division will fold, too, since the odds of Hellgate completely falling out of 2007 are just as good.

Wait, so now my prediction is "WRONG ALREADY" because ... you think so. Well done.

shihonage wrote:

Wait, so now my prediction is "WRONG ALREADY" because ... you think so. Well done.

I do and and Flagship hasn't given anyone any reasonable person any reason to think otherwise.