Analysts predict the under- achievers

The holiday release schedule effectively ends this week with the release of "Prince of Persia" for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3, the first entry in the series for the new console generation, but that hasn't stopped analysts from predicting which titles will flounder in the weak economy.

Though there are always titles that are bound to do well in the holiday season due to heavy marketing ("LittleBigPlanet") or being a recognized franchise ("Gears of War 2"), there are also bound to be some titles that don't perform to their projected expectations.

Game industry analysts Ed Barton (Screen Digest), Jesse Divnich (EEDAR), and Michael Pachter (Wedbush Morgan) offered their opinions on which games would underperform this holiday season. These included the Xbox 360-exclusive "Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts" developed by Rare, and the multiplatform games "Need for Speed: Undercover," "Spider-Man: Web of Shadows" and "Tomb Raider: Underworld."

Divnich believes that "as consumers become more judicious with their discretionary income this holiday season, quality scores will likely have a bigger weight on a gamers purchasing decision than in previous holidays."

While these are all based on speculation, some of these predictions are warranted or based on previous attempts by developers. It's no secret, that ever since Rare was released from Nintendo the company has been struggling to achieve the success they managed a decade ago. Rare-developed Xbox 360 titles like "Kameo: Elements of Power," "Perfect Dark Zero," and "Viva Piñata" have been consistent underperformers, leading former Microsoft Corporate Vice President Peter Moore to say in an interview that "their skill sets were from a different time and a different place and were not applicable in today's market."

Other titles have to do with their relative history in the market. "Need for Speed" has been a franchise steadily decreasing in quality over the past few years, and consumers may not want to risk spending money on "Spider-Man: Web of Shadows" after the disastrous "Spider-Man 3" and "Spider-Man: Friend or Foe" games.

"Tomb Raider" has received lavish praise since Crystal Dynamics began to develop the series and reinvented the franchise, but three games in three years might have negative effects on critics (the same thing has happened to the "Rayman Raving Rabbids" franchise for the Nintendo Wii). One analyst went so far as to say that "Animal Crossing: City Folk" would perform well because "the Wii audience is dominated by the mass-market audience, and Animal Crossing is somewhat more hardcore than most Nintendo titles," and that it would underperform based on relative expectations.

This doesn't necessarily mean that these games are bad, these predictions merely guess where consumer money will be spent. With the burgeoning casual market boom, consumers are more than likely to pick up established franchises rather than experiment with other titles within the same genre, hence some of these aforementioned games will probably do better than these analysts are expecting (i.e. "Animal Crossing: City Folk"). There's also skepticism over whether consumers will actually research review scores online before choosing between similar games like "Need for Speed Undercover" and "Midnight Club: Los Angeles."