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Technology Stocks : Activision....Returns! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lord Smooth who wrote (1327)	12/8/1998 11:31:00 AM
From: Tom Caruthers	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1992

The Wall St. Journal reported the other day that Zelda: The Ocarina of Time....is a hot seller predicted to be the biggest money-maker this Christmas. Reports are that the game is selling out everywhere...many retailers don't expect Nintendo to get the games in by Christmas, despite a couple of hundred thousand games being produced now. This may be good for other N64 vendors, like ATVI....they will benefit from desperate parents trying to find other games to fill their kid's stockings. This may be good because it's now official: Fighter Squadron and Heavy Gear II won't make this quarter. They will both come out in Q4. Dammit. Obviously my call for a sharp upspike was extremely poorly timed. I am very sorry. ogr.com Aarrrgggh. Well....this is obviously a big negative for this quarter. How much of a negative is still in question. It is true, as Alex has pointed out, that there is a glut of games on the market this Christmas, the field is way overcrowded, and everyone who has cash, has already bought and is playing a bunch of games. Next quarter will be better as far as the number of game releases will be less...though the gaming dollars are not necessarily out there in Q4. Well, this is the lesser of two evils. Heavy Gear II has been in development and production for one and a half years. To release buggy code would minimize its sales anyway, ruin ATVI's reputation once and for all, kill the Heavy Gear franchise once and for all and give it a fate like SIN. A solid release will be the exact opposite. I believe that ATVI will ultimately record both the earnings and revenues slotted for Heavy Gear II, so that the numbers for this fiscal year will not be affected...but it sure casts uncertainty for this quarter...depending on whether management factored this game's sales for this quarter....the conference call last quarter did not hardly mention HG2 at all... Fighter Squadrons, given the success of MSFT Flight Simulator (Consistently top 5 game seller)... might have done well, but the field is pretty crowded. The thing is this: Console games will by and far outsell PC based games this quarter. This is the quarter when kids are screaming for games on their Playstation and N64. Looking back to last year, this was very true. The companies who had solid console titles did extremely well (THQI, ERTS, AKLM) while others who were too dependent on PC titles did relatively poorly (BROD, ATVI, MPRS). This year, ATVI is in the running with a huge slate of console games, and may do well. I guess we will see. Tom