March Game Sales Trend Downward

kukyfrope writes "This is the third consecutive month video game sales have declined from their marks in respective months from last year. March 2006 sales are down 18% from their marks in March 2005. Are gamers saving for expensive next-gen systems or are there a limited number of games worth buying?" From the article: "The estimate also reflects $122 million in sales contribution from new platforms (Xbox 360, PSP and DS) representing year-over-year growth of $58 million (the PSP and DS were available last March), which was unfortunately more than offset by a steeper decline in sales of current generation software (-33% or $157 million)."

Comments

News just in...

[Lewisham]

Dearth of games while developers switch all their production teams to the next generation of consoles that aren't out to much of the market yet.

News at 11. ...seriously, this is exactly what happens during this time. I don't see how this is surprising.

Re:Im in the demographic that isnt buying

[psocccer]

You know I'm in the "not buying lots of games anymore" dept too, but what I think people overlook as they enter that stage is that for every one of us that moving on to other things, there's someone who's getting their first job at McDonalds and having $50 to $100 a week of free cash, which means they're now buying 4 games a month and a lot of DVD's and CD's (instead of us).

It's not like we were the last generation of people to ever have time to play games, there will always be someone to take our place. What is really indicated by this kind of article though is that either:

• The next generation of kids with free-time does not like video games
• or (more likely) the current crop of games just isn't that great because we're in a hardware transition cycle so people are waiting/saving more for next-gen (and developers are spending less on making good current-gen games too)

Never fear, come next spring sales will be up again.