14 DAY TRIAL // Videogaming is a very tough market, every single genre has more and more titles fighting for supremacy and all the developers and publishers are trying to exploit every potential niche. Out of all the game genres out there, several have proven to be very profitable over the years, the likes of action titles will always be number one, but now we see some movement for the number two spot, as music games are becoming more and more popular.
A recent study made by market researcher Odyssey showed that music games, like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, overtook sports titles, like Madden or FIFA, for the number two spot on the most popular game genres out there. The company, which has been studying the gaming market since 1994 said that this shift was bound to happen considering the huge popularity and coolness that these music games enjoy among customers. Also, sports games haven't come up with anything very attractive for quite some time and the market is saturated with them.
Concrete numbers show that 58 percent of North American gamers play music titles which were defeated only by action games, holding 65 percent of the market. Sports titles now only occupy half of the market, showing a steady decrease since 2007, for example, when they were played by 55 percent of gamers. This isn't very good news for traditional sports games publishers like 2K Sports or Electronic Arts, but let's not forget that EA is also the distributor for Rock Band, so it isn't complaining.
This shift was really shaping up in the last few years. When you look at the huge number of gamers who play the Guitar Hero or Rock Band titles, it's quite clear that the games are very popular for every kind of player, young or old, male or female. Also, this genre has been observed by other companies than EA, distributor for Rock Band, and Activision, those behind Guitar Hero. Japanese console manufacturer Nintendo just released their own music game for their Wii console entitled, what else, Wii Music, which gives gamers the opportunity to play over 60 different instruments using only the WiiMote and Nunchuk, eliminating the instruments found in Rock Band or Guitar Hero.