Games are recession-proof earners?
Convincing work from consumer research groups suggests that video games are recession-proof earners:
Gaming fans shopping recently at a Best Buy in San Francisco echoed Riley's words; Malou Taylor says she's more likely to play a game than go to a movie.Um, yah -- and then there's this little thing called "massively multiplayer games" you guys mighta heard of? In Tough Economic Times, Video Games Console (via Guardian Games)"I might as well use the money on a game that I can have for a longer time," she says...
Though video games initially earned a bad rap for being something of a loner activity, gaming has become an increasingly sociable event. Some couples, like Benjamin Gerald and Char Williams, say they stay home together and play.
"Last night, we spent, like, six hours," Gerald says. "Char was playing the game, and I'm sitting on the couch next to her ... I'm totally involved, even though I'm not even playing the thing."
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Atari thought the same in 1982...
Yeah, it just cycles differently.
Yeah MMO's...
Where husband and wife only really talk in the game...that's a nice life. (And yes, I've known a few couples like that.)
Or your eat, sleep, work, and play your MMO (some call it Evercrack...) (also, known from personal friend, 5 years and going).
I like my solitary games. The ones that involve killing things. :-)
My wife and I have very little money for extravagances. When a bit more than we need comes in, we always buy cool toys to get us through hard times. We may be eating beans and rice, and living in the student ghetto; but we have cable internet, computers, and cameras!
Video games artist...ME.
It is odd that games just don't get hit so hard.
Our over heads are a lot lower than films and the industry banks 2 to 1 dollars compared to movies.
I asked the boss here at my company if he was worried, not in the least apparently.
We are pretty big for an Indy and have our own IP, so fingers crossed will be fine.
To pick up the MMO discussion: In the last 5 months I've been playing World of Warcraft. The game says my total played time has just cleared 11 days, that's 264 hours. This means I play about 52 hours a month, and this costs me ÂŁ9 (about $15-18) so about 17 pence for each hour of entertainment.
Going to the cinema = ÂŁ8 for say 2 hours of entertainment = ÂŁ4 an hour.
Drinking in the pub = Say ÂŁ10 an hour in drinks.
Bowling or similar leisure activities = crazy in the UK at about ÂŁ15 for a 1-2 hours.
As such WOW is one of the most cost-effective paid-for-entertainment activities you can engage in. Okay it's not for everyone, but it keeps me happy at a bargain price in these troubled times!
WoW is the modern equivalent of the old dime-got-you-a-newsreel-a-cartoon-a-short-feature-and-a -main-feature cinemas. Sure, the library (or leeching off B&N) is free, but at 50c a day, WoW is about as close as you can get to free and not be.
I think the 'recession proof'-ness of games has come from the recent, Nintendo-fuelled expansion of the games market- for every ÂŁ40 'h4rdc0r3' gamer that's been credit crunched out of the hobby, someone's dropped ÂŁ60 on a Wii Fit and balance board to put in the cupboard and not use.
We see games reach the same ubiquity as film and music, and then they'll be as boned as everyone else.
Also: the high score and puzzle-solving nature of games made them inherently social from day one- only appearing 'anti social' because there were so few gamers.
Bread and Circuses
We bought a Nintendo a little while after they first came out knowing it would be cheap entertainment. It was a big initial investment for us but we couldn't afford to go out to movies or bowling or even Mcdonalds very often being a 1 income family of 4. The part we never expected is that even though there is all of these newer better games out there, I still occasionally would catch my son playing it up untill about 2 years ago. I guess it dosn't owe us anything.
@Lilorfnannie
Oddly enough I never really saw what was so bad about bread and cicuses, If I'm well fed, and well entertained then to be honest I'm better off than most of the rest of the world so that'll do me fine. I can provide the intellectual stimulation for myself.
Hey, the film industry did pretty well during the depression.
Struggling or not, entertainment brings a little relief to the hardships of everyday life.
Having been in my share of rocky financial situations I can say that nothing takes the edge off of the accumulating stress of fretting about it than spending a little money on something that brings me joy. If that's a game, so be it, it works.
I'm poor, struggling to figure out my education expenses, and generally worry about money a lot. A friend recently gifted me the money to pre-order Fallout 3, the collector's edition even. I won't even have the game until as late as November, but being able to spend without worry and know it'll bring me a fair bit of fun that I'll be able to go back to and enjoy again and again for years helps make it less troubling to be strapped for cash.
This is another reason why a lot of people are troubled by limited activation games-as-a-service that only sell you a key, a license, and a contract saying nobody's required to make sure your game still works in 3 years.
A lot of people, be they poor or just not much of an avid gamer, view buying a game as adding to a collection instead of as paying for n hours of entertainment for a couple of playthroughs. For them that system represents a fundamental threat to what they're used to doing. Pop the disc in, install, and find out that you can't play what you bought anymore because the servers are down or you used up your credits or whatever. Your investment is held captive and ransomed back to you every time you install it.
As a fairly long-time MMO player, I've seen it really has proven to be the cheapest form of entertainment for many people. It is a very social form of entertainment because you are forced by the structure of the game to play with people, and with many people at once to accomplish significant things. I consider this a positive effect.
Regarding the husband & wife duo, do you really think that most couples spend more than a half hour in conversation any given day? Assuming you sit down and eat dinner together (my wife and I do), that might buy you 30 minutes. Considering how few families sit down to dinner without a TV on, I consider that an extravagance to be enjoyed! If a couple games together, they'll at least have something in common, and spend a bit more time experiencing the same thing at the same time (unlike splitting up to watch sports vs drama every night).
Lastly, with games like World of Warcraft raking in an estimated 900m per year, the video game industry has been making considerably more money than the movie industry for quite some time here (since 1992). Interesting eh?
I think “recession proof” may be a definitive statement that I wouldn’t count on. With the kind of chaos that has manifested in the economy (USA and others), I wouldn’t be surprised if gaming gets pinched too.
That's how my wife and I play games, I control the character, she cheers, makes suggestions, reads maps, etc. We debate moves before we make them.
We're not interested in MMO's or anything like that. It's not the same thing, we like to play together.
bb
Well recession-proof doesn't mean they don't even notice there's a recession, it means they survive one with considerably fewer bruises and broken bones.
Entertainment is often considered a "luxury", but when economies are doing poorly, luxury goods tend to get bitten pretty hard, entertainment still manages to keep a viable source of income and is generally a lot less likely to be going bankrupt.
This was true even during the worst economic disaster the US has ever known. Movie studios most certainly felt the depression, but unlike so many other industries they still had the ability to keep the money flowing and even grow and expand their business. A far cry from those who were closing up shop because the money just stopped coming in.
I remember sitting in my front room with my house mates, all of whom were game artists playing Tomb Raider, the first one, by commitee.
We'd all be getting on with stuff but would look in and make suggestions.
It was quite a lot of fun to not "play" the game.
I'm not surprised, as everyone else has said, the games themselves are very cheap entertainment.
The consoles are fairly cheap, but people don't their cost or the peripherals into consideration, and I say this because I dropped something like $900 on the Xbox 360 release.
As far as PC games how about that computer you're playing on? Does that count? Sure, I would have a computer anyway, but I know I wouldn't have spent quite as much on mine if I didn't want to occassionally play a game on them. Yeah WoW's system requirements are low enough to be running on my Apple ][e (nyuk), bit it's an exception to the rule. Also, don't forget that for MMOs and Xbox live etc. how much broadband costs.
And there's one more thing that costs money that begins to add up. The electricity. My PC/Xbox/TV adds an extra 10-12 bucks easily, money that would have been saved had I read a book for entertainment.
You add all that up, and I actually don't think gaming is really that cheap.
I think this has a lot to do with wanting to go back in time. In really bad economic situations, what one really desperately wants to do is go back and change things - get better schooling, take one job instead of another, not take out that mortgage, etc. One wants to be able to go back and tell oneself - "Hey! Going that way is a bad idea!"
In real life, of course, it doesn't work that way. Time goes one direction, and you can't go back. Games, unlike other entertainment, are interactive environments in which one CAN go back - die, and try again! Reset, and return to the last save point! It's escapism that solves the exact issues that hurt so much in real life, especially when you're really wishing you could take back your last couple of major life decisions.
It just reminds me of a big digital sign I saw above a musical instrument shop the other day. It was like, "High price of gas got you down? Stay home and play music!" I don't know if the marketing campaign will work, but I actually really liked the idea of people everywhere in this new economy learning to play the piano and violin and such.
Just think...what did people do for entertainment before movies and gaming?
I think the current economic problems will see a shift in the next year or two away from as many MMO games and back toward single player or non-MMO multiplayer games. The competition in the market, and the idea that you have to keep paying monthly to play the game (even if it is cheaper per hour than just about any other non-free entertainment option) will make it harder both for developers to justify producing new MMOs, and for people to continue playing them). Especially a new one, which requires the game purchase in addition to the monthly fee.
I expect games like Spore will do really well with a lot of replayability for your initial purchase. As well as multiplayer action RPGs like Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 when they come out (assuming things haven't significantly improved by then).
And of course console games generally do well, so the Wii will probably continue to sell games, even if new console purchases drop off some (which they probably will).
Of course if things get really bad, you can always break out the board games (or break them out even if things get better. They're fun!)
The reality is that by becoming more "social" games have actually become less social.
Anyone with a PS3 or 360 will have noticed that there are dramatically fewer games which you can actually play locally.
There are huge numbers of games (the vast majority) that on past video game systems would've been locally multiplayer are now exclusively online.
Sure, being able to play with someone in another continent or across the country is an advance in gaming, but it shouldn't be a replacement for going at a game with a group of friends.
Afterall, I find that playing online against people often doesn't feel any more social than playing against the computer, save for some 12-year old yelling out racist slurs.
I can vouch for this... HMV in the UK has reduced drastically the footage allocated to Music CDs and DVDs, and expanded the space for Console games... they must know something based on their sales figures over the past few months.
I am sooo happy to see these kind of reports. I have been playing video and computer games since when I was a tiny little girl.
We were the first family on our block (this was China in the 80's) to own a coloured TV and a video game console. The entire family had a blast. It was beyond luxury for us.
Nowadays, I some time get the odd comment from friends telling me to "get out more often", and I tell them, I will if you are going to pay for all the expenses. We don't own a car, and transit here in Vancouver is horrible. Neither me nor my boyfriend drinks, therefore we don't go to pubs. So the most entertaining and best value per loony spent activity is playing computer games.
I don't even have cable TV, but, we do own a huge collection of movie DVDs and games!
In today's society, it's acceptable to be a couch potato watching garbage on TV, but why is it "anti-social" if you're an avid gamer? I'm glad that attitude is changing.
MargretLi,
Vancouver is the coolest city. You should get out more. Just kidding. I played video games as a little girl, too, but at some point got the idea that it was more for boys. Obviously, I missed out on a lot. I'm going to try to get up to speed, though, as we prepare for the long lean winter ahead...