Japan: Comparison Peak Years Switch & DS

[Dulfite]

Valdney said:

Dulfite said:

Not to get "political" but Nintendo benefited from shut downs and people fearing to go outside and interact with each other (I'm neither saying that's right or wrong as I don't want this to turn political). That was with no national shut down because of a split federal government, and many states (such as my own) had life more or less go on as normal except for our big city, so the videogame market in these more conservative areas probably didn't explode like the more shut down liberal areas.

Now we will have one party controlling Congress (granted with centrists having way more control now due to the closeness of the House and Senate, Joe Manchin may literally be the most powerful person in Congress, perhaps more powerful than Biden in the Executive branch) and that's the party that has been more on the shut down side. If Biden and all the Democrats in House/Senate agree a national shut down (which I can't imagine the moderates will want that) will happen, and if the SC doesn't rule it unlawful, then our isolation from 2020 will be nothing compared to 2021 and Switch could have an even more explosive year as now all the conservative states and areas will feel the impact of shut downs and feel more isolated.

I disagree that lockdowns are going to help video games sales this year. Locking people down (wrong or right) can only help video games sales up to a certain point. If this continues, people’s income will shrink to desperation levels and people will simply not have money to spend on video games. We are entering depression territory and,  pretty much any form of entertainment dos not do particularly good during such times. 

During the Great Recession both the movie and gaming industry were doing well despite much of the economy being down overall.

Movies Really Are Recession-Proof | The New Yorker

Is the video game industry recession-proof? - CNET

When people are losing jobs/taking pay cuts, they stop spending on major purchases (like a new car/house/trip to Disney world) and apparently spend a large amount still on small purchases that can get them through it, mentally speaking, like video games and seeing a movie. Cheap escapism in the form of games has now done well with two recessions over the last two decades (The Great Recession and the Covid-19 Recession). Unlike that recession, people know this is a somewhat fabricated recession in the sense that if and once Covid-19 is manageable people expect to get their jobs back. We were doing record numbers as an economy with almost perfect unemployment (which is 3% and we were very close to that), then Covid-19 caused things to tank. The stock market being far healthier than 2008-2009 is also an indicator that people aren't taking Covid-10 as seriously economically, in the long run at least, as when the housing market burst. And even if they were, the evidence from 12-14 years ago shows people still spend money when its only dozens of dollars a purchase.