Gamer @ Heart said:
These horrible sales for June games make me feel like summer will continue to be a barren wasteland next year.
I am getting more and more the feeling that 2010 is the year that the Great Recession finally caught up to the video game industry. When you have near 10% unemployment for so long, with nearly half of those being unemployed for 6 months or longer, it is going to affect video games too.
Publishers can bitch about piracy, used game sales, etc. Gamers can speculate about exhaustion from yearly iterations/too many sequels etc. Third-parties can bitch about not being able to beat Nintendo. But the fact is that very many consumers are hurting, and video games are a luxury item.
The idea that that video games are immune to the recession, and somehow comparable to five cent movie theater tickets in the Great Depression, was always kind of laughable, since it's a hobby that takes literally hundreds of dollars just to play and thousands to be a hardcore gamer(assuming one buys all your games, retail, day one, as the industry needs gamers to do to meet revenue goals). But the bottom is dropping out. We're going to see more and more bombs, and probably more studio closings.
Sony and Microsoft aren't having a ten year console cycle this time because they want the games to mature like some fine wine. I'm sure they've run the numbers, and determined that consumers simply can't afford another leap.*
*I will be more than happy to be proven wrong by a booming economy and resurgent video game sales.