NJ5 said:
In the Great Depression of the 1920s / 1930s, cinema revenues skyrocketed. Tickets were cheap and it provided a much needed escape from reality for affected people (i.e. almost everyone). Nowadays, gaming gives a high value for money. Buy a $200-$300 console every 5 years, and you have access to games which can provide you with days, weeks or months of entertainment. So people will spend less money on other things, and will still spend on gaming. Gaming did have an impact from the recession, but December was more or less a good month (hardware revenue up, software revenue down).
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I think software revenue has probably peaked (or nearly peaked) for the generation because, from this point forward, there is an increasing number of low-cost and high quality games available that are just as good to consumers who haven't played them as any new game. While a game like F.E.A.R 2 certainly was not worth $60 to me new at $20 it was a great deal, and the time I spent playing that recently was time I didn't spend playing a full price new game; and when you take behaviour like this and start to generalize it, it represents a drop in revenue even if people are buying more games.
