Game Industry Optimistic About Surviving Economic Crisis

CNet is running a story about how the gaming industry is looking at the recent economic troubles. Despite their status as luxury items, games and game systems have seen strong sales numbers in recent months, and that trend is expected to continue into the holiday season. Most companies are optimistic, despite the fact that many of their stock values have been hit hard and that analysts' views are divided on whether game-related purchases will be one of the first things cut from consumers' budgets. "'I do think that the video game industry is going to do reasonably well in this time of recession because video games are a pretty damned efficient use of time,' said Bridges. 'That said, the...industry has some other problems that it has been ignoring for awhile and that are creeping up on it.' Essentially, Bridges explained, he thinks that the dominance of giant publishers like EA and their general reliance on physical, in-the-box, units, can't hold up. Instead, he said, new tools, ubiquitous broadband and hungry independent developers are going to all combine to eat away at the continued supremacy of the $60 big-name title. And that could spell big trouble for the industry."

Comments

simpler explanation

[ILuvRamen]

there's all that psychological "people want video games to make themselves happy during a recession" stuff and then there's reality. It's really quite simple: Teenagers buy most video games. Teenagers don't have investments and mortgages that tanked nor are they good at saving instead of spending. Thus, game sales are doing just fine. But of course if the marketing and finance departments at video game companies said that the boss would think they weren't working very hard.

Re:It's not the retail sales.

[KDR_11k]

Perhaps they should dial down the game budgets then, I'm pretty sure those new market games Nintendo is making aren't exactly costing tens of millions.