2005 Game Sales Set Record

Despite a Holiday slump, 2005 game sales hit all-time highs. Gamasutra reports: "The growth was largely driven through an expanding market for handheld systems. Previously dominated by Nintendo's Game Boy series, 2005 saw the market expand to comfortably support three handhelds: the existing Game Boy Advance, Nintendo's 'third pillar' in the Nintendo DS, and Sony's PlayStation Portable. Portable software sales rose to $1.4 billion, a rise of 42 percent over 2004. The Game Boy Advance, due to its longer lifespan and greater install base, still took the majority of the handheld game market, claiming 52 percent of portable game sales."

Comments

Give credit where credit is due....

[argStyopa]

"The growth was largely driven through an expanding market for handheld systems."

Maybe it's just sloppy language, but I think this is mistaking a result for a cause. The (revenue) growth may have been MAINLY in the handheld categories, but it was driven by:
- Hollywood failing to generate a single new idea for the past 3(?) years. Despite the lack of ideas, movie tickets are now somewhere just south of $10 each, making a "movie night" for a family of 4, plus dinner at a moderate restaurant, popcorn, pop = roughly a hundred-dollar evening. Normal families can't really afford this as a 'routine' entertainment anymore.
- Each of the major-league sports is riven with controversy, usually because the thuggish behavior of it's whinging prima-donna multigajillionaire stars. Simultaneously, despite ever-increasing salaries, performance (san steroids) in major league sports has never been more disappointing. Likewise free-agency and insanely high ticket prices have utterly destroyed any sort of hometown team loyalty any fans ever felt.
- In my region, the increasing prevalence of "outdoor" diseases such as "bird flu" and Lyme Disease means that kids are spending ever more time indoors when possible.
- Finally, 2-income households and parents working 50, 60, even 70 hours per week just to make ends meet means that children are more and more left on their own. Better to buy them a video game system and KNOW that they are being amused relatively safely, than to leave them to their own devices and god-only-knows what they'll get up to.

Seems a relatively logical trend, to me.