14 DAY TRIAL // October was not a good month for the videogames industry in the United States, which remains the biggest market in the world. Overall, the industry is 19% down over the same period in 2008, going down to just 1.07 billion dollars, making it worse than the same period in 2007.
But it seems that even if the numbers don't look too good, especially after the ray of hope represented by September, the seeds are being sown at the moment for a rebound that will take flight in the early months of 2010 if not by Christmas this year.
Anita Frazier, who is the analyst commenting on the figures for the NPD Group, said that “Based on typical industry seasonality, the industry is on track to generate full-year revenues in the range of $20 to $21 billion in the U.S., which would put it just a bit below last year's sales of $21.3 billion.”
One of the big unknowns at the moment is how the performance of two big releases, Modern Warfare 2 from Infinity Ward and Activision, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii from Nintendo, will factor in at the end of the year, especially considering that these titles have the potential to drive up hardware sales.
The big worry is that the price cuts, which have come to all the major home gaming consoles in recent months, are not really having the impact they should have. Sales volume is up over months like August but the loss of revenue from taking the price down to 299 and 199 dollars is bigger than the sales increase. This means that, on the long term, sales of videogames themselves will become more important even for big manufacturers. So, expect the hype for Starcraft II and God of War III to ramp up as their release dates approach.