Sales record won’t be beaten for another five years, says Screen Digest analyst
A fresh trio of game consoles released in the next few years won’t be enough to stop a seven-year slump in the games market, a leading games analyst has said.
Screen Digest chief analyst Ben Keen said the game industry faced “structural challenges”, with the UK sales not expected to hit 2008 levels until 2015.
New consoles, which he predicted would arrive from late 2012, would still not push the market to its record GBP2.5 million spending levels set in 2008.
If it weren’t for the rise of the digital and social market, he said, the situation would be much worse.
“We are really at a tipping point here,” he told a packed audience at this year’s London Games Conference.
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Packaged goods will decline and the online and mobile market will – more or less – fill the void, he said. Over a fifth of revenues in the next five years will come from digital and online sales.
The overall decline will remain for many reasons, from a cyclical hardware decline, to piracy, to the rise of the pre-owned market and the growth of social.
We’re in a risk-reward business, he added, and the risk is growing fast.
A report published in February concluded that the world's three biggest games retail markets together fell by eight per cent.
There's no need for new consoles. The PS3 is hardly being pushed right now by anyone other than Sony. Maybe if third party developers wake up they'll see they can really make great games on this generation of hardware. Gamers are tired of the same old 360 quality games. Start making really PS3 games and you'll see improved sales
The more a console is explored the more studios can get out of it - completely understand.
But the crucial thing Mr Keen was saying last night is that the retail market is in decline, and that only new consoles will bring it back to record levels.
The caveat is that it will be another five years before the slump is over, even with new consoles.
If things are so risky for the publishing market, image how they'd be without new consoles...
Kinect, interestingly, is reviving the market.
And now you wonder, why isn't it sweet...
My company has been trying to obtain Microsoft's test kit for localization testing for about a YEAR now. With Sony -- we didn't even get any reply from them.
I can imagine other effects of "approval process" enforced by those two, but then -- I can't imagine, how can the analysts / sales magicians genuinely wonder what is the cause of the decline in their sales.
Surprise, surprise... It's you, guys, shooting yourself in the foot, by limiting the access to test/dev kits through licensing/high prices.
