This should tell you all you need to know
"The video game industry capped off a rough year in the United States with a horrible holiday month that saw sales plummet year-over-year across all categories. Market research firm The NPD Group recently released its sales estimates for December 2011 and the full year, and neither set of figures paints a pretty picture. Last month, total industry sales plummeted to $3.99 billion, down 21% from $5.07 billion in December 2010. Hardware sales dropped 28% to $1.32 billion in December, and software sales were down 14% to $2.08 billion. “December was very rough for new physical sales of video games hardware, software and accessories,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement. “Because of the great slate of content that came to market during the fourth quarter, I had expected December sales to represent a larger portion of total year sales than what occurred. This year, December accounted for just 23% of annual sales, while the average for the past ten years has been 28.” For the full year, hardware sales were down 11% to $5.58 billion, software sales dipped 6% to $8.83 billion and total industry sales slid 8% to $17.02 billion."
http://www.bgr.com/2012/01/16/video-game-sales-fall-21-in-december-down-8-for-full-year-2011/
That was despite CoD:MW3 having a reccord launch, Skyrim and BF3 doing ~10m each. If something doesn't change lots of smaller devs will go out of business trying to match the advertising and production values of megafranchises, devs and publishers see next gen consoles as a way of resetting the board and launching new IPs with less risk.
@TheVoxelman on twitter
