Pachter: Industry will continue to decline til Microsoft and Sony release new consoles

Videogame industry sales have been down this past year with no sign of recovering, and ubiquitous industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan states not even the Wii U will give the industry a boost. He thinks Microsoft and Sony need to release a new console system to reverse the trend.

According to Pachter in an interview, “We expect October – December to be relatively flat, and expect a return to negative territory again next year, at least until the launch of a next-generation console from Microsoft or Sony.”

“A new console cycle is likely to reverse the negative sales trends of the last several years… Nintendo will launch the Wii U on November 18, and, while neither Sony nor Microsoft has yet announced new hardware, we expect a PS4 no later than November 2013, and a next Xbox no later than March 2014.

“We believe that the publishers plan an unprecedented number of new games for launch in the first two years of the next generation, providing relief from the gamer fatigue we’ve seen over the last three years.”

Pachter had already stated back in June that he expected the Xbox 720 to see a March 2014 launch.