Video game sales immune to the recession
Consumers still happy to spend cash on games
House prices are plummeting, the banks don't have any money to lend anyone (or they didn't before the government gave them the early Christmas present of hundreds of billions of pounds) and Iceland has gone bankrupt, but it seems the doom and gloom hasn't affected the video game market at all.
As Edge reports, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has said of the situation: "Notwithstanding this month's anticipated decline, we believe that the videogame software sector remains highly recession-resistant...
"...As a category, games are one of the lowest cost forms of entertainment, particularly to those households that have already invested in a home console."
That's one of the first times we've heard someone say games are low cost.
US retail figures for September are expected to have fallen 6 per cent on last year - but that's mainly due to tough competition. Halo 3 was released last September and there wasn't a comparably massive game out last month.
Hardware-wise, Pachter says he expects Wii to have sold 600,000 units, DS 550,000, Xbox 360 300,000 and PSP 200,000.
Not bad for a country that's skint.
The basic point behind this story is then - fingers crossed, it doesn't look like we need to worry about games studios going under and titles being cancelled. We might not be able to afford food or petrol but - god dammit - we're not missing out on LocoRoco 2.
