An interesting read on 1UP following those most recent Take Two announcements.

Our favorite Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is predicting that GTA 5 will be released this year. You'll recognize his name from earlier posts, he's the same gentleman who made the prediction that Cataclysm sales alone would push Blizzard's Earnings well over $600 million for this past quarter (that was only for Cataclysm sales during a one month period too, and excluded pet sales, older WoW sales, and Paid Services. In fact, it probably would have been a prediction of $350 million plus the usual $300 million subs if they were included.)

Oh! A while back, Pachter also predicted GTA 5 would be released in 2010. =]

Here were some of his other past predictions/comments:

1. Mafia II unlikely to be profitable and would not recoup the cost of game development. (Source)

Take Two still has DLC development underway for Mafia II this year. On Steam, it was in the Top 10 of best selling games for 2010 (even though Mafia II came out just 4 months before the end of the year.)

2. Starcraft 2 would sell 6 million units on opening day, however it ended up being 1.5 million instead. (By the end of the first month, they sold 3 million units worldwide and by end of February they sold 4.5 million units.)

After first day sales were released by Blizzard, he adjusted his prediction and made it 5 million total copies within 2-3 months. However, it took 7 months before it reached 4.5 million units. =]

I didn't think it was really fair though, making such a big change after seeing all of the sales details. Not that it helped either though..

3. He was highly skeptical of Red Dead Redemption, and stated that it was not blockbuster material.

4. On a related note, he's predicting that LA Noire will be comparable in sales and just as successful as Red Dead Redemption (after he apologized for underestimating RDR in the first place.)

Personally, I have my doubts about LA Noire though.. it looks like a great game, but it's like releasing a natural disaster movie in the middle of vampire film/TV season. I've been watching Google/Twitter trends and monitoring other various patterns, but there's very little interest in LA Noire so far (especially in comparison to other big name releases coming out during the same period).

I'm worried that the game might end up being too linear or storyline driven, with most of the game taking place with cut scenes and NPC interaction (after all, they spent a lot of time and money on voice acting and facial imaging). If there are too many NPC conversations and detective mini-games that are impossible to lose, it takes away from the freedom and excitement of exploring in RDR and GTA. What if there's little in the way of side quests (errr... "investigations") and everything in the game is based on one single storyline or one investigation after the other? Then it just becomes an interactive visual novel.

The other thing that worries me is that people are mostly talking about how "great it looks", but very little about the actual gameplay, story, characters or music. I still think first month's hypetastic sales will be very good mind you (I'm predicting ~2.5 million worldwide for the first month), but I don't think they will be as high as RDR in the long run. I also think Michael Pachter will be left disappointed with his own sales predictions. =] Hopefully, Team Bondi is developing a very stable game too.. this game is going to make or break them.

5. He thought that Ubisoft DRM was a good idea.

6. He said Borderlands would fail badly.

7. He's predicting that the Activision-Bungie game will sell 10-15 million on opening day. I'll have to come back to this one at a much later date.

His predictions, of course, have a lot of IF's and BUT's. IF it's as popular as Halo, IF it's released on multiple platforms, IF they have a good sales day.. blah blah blah. Come on, where's the hard science and figures?

From what I've seen online, he wasn't too bad going back 5-7+ years ago but things have gone very bad for him since late 2008. So, it's probably a good idea for him to leave his predictions more open ended like he did with the Activision/Bungie unannounced game.

Some mildly interesting stuff:

- Cataclysm sales were supposed to push them over $600 million in revenue (for Cataclysm sales alone, excluding new subs and older WoW game purchases), but they earned $544 million instead. GAAP Revenue was $340 million for this most recent quarter, but they're deferring $204 million to next quarter. Nice way to show a constant revenue growth each quarter. =]

- Earnings basically showed those 4.7 million Cataclysm sales over 3 months as detailed earlier. Since they were expecting to earn about $320 million (if Cataclysm never launched) for the quarter, and that $544 million included all new WoW/TBC/WOTLK sales as well, there doesn't appear to be much of an increase in new subscriptions at all. Cataclysm was supposed to be the expansion pack to bring back all of the old players, but the impact has been minimal.

- That's actually good news for their next expansion pack really. Since the shattering experiment failed, they'll need to do something really big for the next expansion pack to get player's interest back: tons of new dungeons, a couple new professions, and at least two new hero classes would be nice. Maybe a third faction? =] It's going to have to be something very impressive to bring back the masses.

- The new "Project Beachhead" digital platform for Call of Duty.. paid services, communication, online community, exclusive content, digital downloads, and such. It'll basically be Battle.net for the CoD franchise - remember how they eventually wanted to bring everything together as one gigantic "Battle.net"?

- They're discontinuing Guitar Hero and disbanding associated business units (e.g. laying people off, closing studios). They're also killing off True Crime: Hong Kong.

- Activision Blizzard will be announcing an "innovative new universe with broad appeal that will be revealed at Toy Fair later this week and will bring the world of toys, video games and the Internet together in an unprecedented way." This is the first time Activision will be exhibiting at Toy Fair and this isn't for Blizzard related games, so I'm not really interested. It will probably be about their LEGO series or Zhu Zhu Pets or something.. meh.

- Outlook not so good for Blizzard titles in 2011, but they promised at least 2 major releases in 2012. Those would most likely be Diablo 3 and their next SC2 Expansion Pack (Heart of the Swarm) though. Their next-gen MMO is still years away.

- NetEase will be doing their Starcraft 2 launch in China. I wonder how it's going to be received in China..

- Heart of the Swarm will have more details (e.g. release date?) in the "coming months". Diablo 3 beta will be starting soon too (they're playing it cool with Diablo 3, as usual, they don't want to make any announcements yet and want to make sure the game is perfected before release).

The call is over now.. I was hoping for more, but not surprised at all.

FYI.. their stock is falling rapidly as a result of this call too. Mostly because of their statement on low revenue/guidance this year. 2011's going to really suck for both Activision and their customers. =[

* UPDATE:

Confirmation regarding lay-offs. Both Vicarious Visions and Freestyle Games have been hit with notices shortly after the meeting. According to Activision Blizzard's 8-K, they'll be getting rid of approx. 500 employees. The decision was made Feb. 3, and will be taking place on March 31 for the staff.

This same time last year, they laid off approx. 200 people. Apparently, February is the time of month when the non-performing studios need to start worrying.

Take-Two's Quarterly Earnings call is today at 1:30PM PST. And Activision Blizzard's call is tomorrow at 1:30PM PST as well.

The reason you've been seeing a bunch of new game announcements and release dates over the past couple weeks is because we're in the middle of various shareholders meetings and it's the beginning of a new year for gamers.

In the past, Mike Morhaime has used this call for official announcements like release dates, new games, and new services. Take-Two has also announced new games or release dates during this time.

Would be nice if Activision Blizzard were to announce the Diablo 3 release date tomorrow, rather than fans having to wait until BlizzCon 2011. They usually have one big announcement they want to make at BlizzCon.. so that's why I'm hoping the release date is announced much sooner.

* UPDATE:

Looks like the Take Two call was pretty disappointing and simply reiterating what everyone already knew. Their future lineup is looking pretty thin, and I think they're putting all of their bets on MLB2K11, Top Spin 4, DNF, LA Noire and BioShock Infinite. It's nice to see more of a PC lineup for 2011 and 2012 though (e.g. The Darkness 2, X-COM, Bioshock Infinite, and Spec Ops: The Line). At least we'll see X-COM this year but I was hoping for something new, oh well.. hope Activision Blizzard has some good news tomorrow.

I'm starting to get a bad feeling about DNF too.. the game is starting to look very linear and just like DOOM 3 (incl. the dated graphics.) I think there are going to be a lot of disappointed fans when the game comes out with very poor reviews and sales. So if you own stocks in TTWO, I would recommend waiting until the official release date announcement and sell off shares about 1 month before the release date. Then, just buy back shares (at a much reduced price) after the TTWO stock tumbles. =]

First QA question was about Max Payne 3. No updates today, "still being worked on" is what they said last.

He also asked about other versions (platforms and/or DLC) of Red Dead Redemption, but they don't have any announcements about it yet: "nothing to say about future iterations."