Amadeo Plaza of Gamer 2.0 writes:
"Barron's West Coast Editor and technology writer, Eric Savitz, joined us again to delve into this matter by commenting, "There's just no way the videogame industry is going to be immune to this. It can be recession resistance, so it might go down less. And there are a lot of entertainment businesses that can argue the same thing. You can argue the same thing if you're in the cable business. Are you going to shut off your cable? Are you going to shut off your broadband access, or your phone? On the other hand, if you get kicked out of your house..."
The gaming industry isn't going to see the kind of growth it saw last year, and although that was already an expected reality, it's not as though there was a shortage of stellar titles this year."
Writing this was really fun. I strongly believe that no one can hide from the economic crisis we're in. My whole deal is that a lot of gamers are either apathetic to what's going on in the rest of the world, or they're simply blind to it. That upsets me because so much affects our industry, and the economy is one of them. Despite the fact that sales are doing exceptionally well, everyone's stock prices have plummeted, and honestly, at the end of the day, that's all that matters when it comes to the health of a publicly owned company.
im not buying a single game till RE5 comes out. :)
Well if we remember, September was down (I believe) and October was up, but only by a small margin (a little over 10 percent). If you compare that to the growth before the economic fallout, it's pretty big. There were months earlier this year like March that was up 30-40% over 2007, so for October to only grow so little by comparison to the growth earlier in the year, the industry is showing signs of slowing down.
I think it'll grow from 2007, but publisher stocks are sliding.
"Six game industry companies (Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Take Two, THQ, Gamestop and Nintendo) saw their stocks fall an average of 52.53 percent from September to November while the Nasdaq fell 36.91 percent."
Source: Wired Game|Life - http://blog.wired.com/busin...
But I remember reading something about how entertainment (includes video games) usually picks up during recessions because people want to go to movies and other such "distractions" to take their minds off things. Until it gets REALLY bad anyway then it just isn't doable but I thought that all entertainment actually picks up during hard times.