Michael Wallace and Stephen Tam with UBS Securities give investors a heads-up on what they expect from next week‘s big show.

UBS Securities analysts Michael Wallace and Stephen Tam have released an investor preview for next week‘s Electronic Entertainment Expo, and the pair is making some interesting calls on the industry‘s near- and long-term future.

Heading into the next-generation of console wars, Wallace and Tam caution that the coming battle won‘t be waged like the last one. With the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 priced higher than consoles in years past, the pair expects fewer gamers to own both platforms, while Nintendo‘s Wii is a unique enough piece of hardware that companies won‘t be able to blindly port titles to it from other platforms.

"How the software companies fare over the next several years will not be simply a matter of mass-producing games across all platforms," the report states. "They have to make the right choices and support the right platforms, since there is no clear-cut winner in the hardware market like there was in 2000 when Sony launched the [PlayStation 2]. Guessing the installed bases for each platform is harder than it‘s been in the past."

As for what is expected at the show, they break it down by console. Despite Sony‘s assertion at the Game Developers Conference 2006 that Warhawk will be playable at the event, they don‘t expect the PS3 to be playable, and they don‘t expect Sony to put a price tag on the console yet.

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From Gamespot