So the results are in. I know it’s not a game but… well we won. I know it’s dead serious and all of society is about to crumble and that but… gaming totally came top of the leaderboard. With the kills… sorry I mean sales totted up it’s been a financially horrible Christmas. The high street numbers are awful, the worst in 20 years, with a 3.3 percent downturn on last Christmas. Despite trying to put our best foot forward and keep the economy turning over we simply couldn’t spend our limited funds this year on excessive gifts for our friends and relatives.
So desperate are we to save our cash we aren’t venturing out to the pub or cinema. We aren’t spending our evenings in restaurants or clubs, we’re staying in. Of course we as gamers are well aware that one of the most cost effective forms of entertainment is gaming but it seems the general populous have also, out of sheer necessity, learned this lesson too. As the numbers come in for game sales, the suits at big chains like Game are allowing a little upturn at the corners of their mouth. Game are reporting a 16 percent rise in sales for the 6 weeks around Christmas and 2008 overall shows a whopping 28.1 percent group sales rise over 2007. Blockbuster and HMV are also confident for 2009. It’s not just the independent retailers who are sitting pretty amongst the economic chaos, games publishers are also rather pleased with themselves. Nintendo have been knocking it out the park in the UK with massive sales and Ubisoft were named ‘Best Games Publisher for Quality and Attitude to Retail’ in MCV’s recent retail survey.
All these figures bring up a few questions. Firstly is this success within the UK gaming industry likely to be noticed by the Government? There has been much discussion between the industry and the authorities as to whether UK developers should be afforded the same government support and tax breaks as countries like Canada and this past Christmas is an outstanding example of why this industry is so important to the UK economy. On a more gloomy note I wonder if gaming can’t help but eventually be pulled into the blackhole of the financial downturn as every element of the consumer market relies somewhat on every other element.
My last private worry, plucked from the dark recesses of my mind might make me sound like a crackpot conspiracy theorist but it was given some credence by my mother independently making the same accusation. While standing next to each other in Game flicking through the second hand shelves, our hands a blur with years of experience, I expounded this theory about the games industry thriving within and because of the financial crisis. My mother, not looking up from her search said “Yeah but is that really so or has the industry put that idea out there to keep us buying. This economic thing… it’s all psychological, you know?”
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