Looking Back on my Random Geek News Predictions for 2016

The end of 2016 is here and it’s a year that very few people will miss. I made many predictions in 2015 with my crystal ball, but even it could not foresee the vitriolic election season, many celebrity deaths, and the meteoric rise of fake news. Oh well. Enough about what I didn’t even bother to predict, and let’s move on to what I got wrong and what I got right on January 1.

 

Apple Music will hit a wall:

I wrote that Apple Music wouldn’t surpass 15 million subscribers and wouldn’t come close to dethroning Spotify which had 75 million subscribers at the start of 2016.  My prediction results are somewhat mixed. First, Apple DID surpass 15 million users and as of this writing has about 20 million users. The service added 3 million new users near the end of 2016. That said, Spotify still has about 20 million more paid subscribers (40 million), on total Spotify has about 100 million users. So Apple Music did NOT hit a wall. I’ll call it as a miss, even though I wasn’t totally wrong.

 

The “Year of VR” or so they say:

I wrote that in 2016 VR will be a little more than a niche hobby. This turned out to be another mixed bag on my end. Though we had the release of the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the PlayStation VR, I didn’t see the popularity of Samsung’s Gear VR or Google’s Daydream view (which only works with their Pixel phones). While VR is still a niche hobbie, there is serious interest in the technology. The PSVR is the cheapest of the bunch and while there were many units available at launch, subsequent stock is now difficult to find at a reasonable price. The headset will probably become easier to find once Sony releases new units. So VR isn’t huge, but it’s more popular than I predicted. My verdict? Mostly right.

 

The Xbox One closes the sales gap with the PS4:

I predicted that the Xbox One would have a strong push and come within a few units of the PS4’s sales. I was completely wrong in this instance. In 2016 the PS4 has sold about 50 million units worldwide, and saw huge gains with its holiday bundles and the release of the PS4 Pro. As for the Xbox One, it saw four months where Xbox One S sales surpassed PS4 sales. Still a few strong months didn’t even come close to making a dent in the sales gap. Microsoft stopped releasing sales numbers months ago, but the Xbox One is estimated to lag behind the PS4 by 20 million units.

 

The Nintendo NX is pushed into 2017:

I predicted that the Nintendo NX wouldn’t be released until 2017. This wasn’t a hard prediction to make and I was on the mark. It took until near the end of 2016 for Nintendo to release information such as the NX’s real name, the Nintendo Switch, and the true nature of the console (it is indeed a console/handheld/tablet hybrid). More details about the Switch such as a price won’t drop until January, but the console has a March release window. After so many wrong or mixed predictions it feels good to be totally right about one thing.

 

Angel Beats is given a Steam release, thanks to Clannad:

I predicted that the Clannad visual novel would be so popular that Angel Beats would also be released. Honestly, I hadn’t heard a peep from Angel Beats in 2016, but the fate of an English translation was mentioned at least once. So, I end my 2016 predictions on another mixed, but mostly wrong note. The game’s developer, Visual Art’s noted that about half of the Angel Beats visual novel had been translated into English, but there’s no release date in mind. So Angel Beats will arrive in English someday and may or may not be on Steam.

 

Stay tuned tomorrow for my 2017 predictions!