Pardon this being stuck here, but I didn't think of an ideal place for this.  It relates to gaming, and sales, but on a personal level.  Anyhow, onto the thread...

It is easy to think of gaming as an escape from the woes of reality, but consider these things:

* In the United States, gas could hit $6/gallon:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/42683030

* U.S government cash handouts now exceed tax revenues:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/04/20/government-cash-handouts-exceed-tax-revenues/

* The U.S dollar is now at a 15 month low against the Euro:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/20/markets/dollar_euro/index.htm?hpt=T2

Factor in other bad stuff happening and how will you be impacted?  It is possible big cuts in government handouts are coming, and if things slow down, unemployment could spike up to.  In the case of myself, there is NO WAY I buy like before.  I am on less than shoe strings and debate whether or not to drive anywhere if I have to.  So, all the buying I did was out.  I will jump on some digital downloads from time to time, but that is about it.  Get a 3DS?  YOU MAD?  I need to keep the car on the road, and now a new handheld?  Really?  Forget everything else also.

How about anyone else here?  If gas gets to $5-$6/gallon in the United States, then what do you do?  Might make sense to save money now, to have a reserve also.

I dont live in the US, and Australia wasn't hit hard and is now stronger than US Dollar. 

because of that i have been able to import games at an lower cost (47 dollars for an brand new recently released PS3 game) compared to retail 110 dollars. An retail have been lowing there prices from the once 120 dollars an game back down to 110, and now many are going around the 80-90 mark. I got portal 2 for 80 dollars. 

So its had an postive effect with myself able to buy more games than i ever could. 

Also on petrol we pay 1.40 USD a litre and because of the price war between our supermarket(who own most of the petrol stations) as well as the libya crisis(despite no oil comes to us from there)  we been paying around 30 cents more. But petrol used to be at one stage an 1.80 with the risk of going to 2.00 a litre. But we around 50 % tax on our fuel, because the money got to come somewhere to pay the free health system.

$6 is nothing for a gallon of fuel.  On Saturday I passed a petrol station on the A303 where unleaded is at £1.45 a litre, which works out as roughly $10.76 (used XE for exchange rate and then x4.5) a gallon.

Anyway, at least here in the U.K at least, there is a sort of price war between retailers over the 3DS.  For some reason no RRP was given, so retailers just charged whatever the hell they wanted.  When they first became available for pre-order the price was £230 ($379), when mine was posted on release date they were £196 ($326), but on Amazon have them now at £180 ($297).

The United States is spread out geographically and has built its economy on people driving cars all over.  This has an impact on decisions people will be making.  And with this, there is an impact.  If America's economy remains sluggish, then people don't work.  Imports from Europe to the United States will end up slowing down, thus impacting Europe in the process.

The short of the question I asked is: If you were very much adversely impacted by the economy, how would it impact your game buying.  Would you go without food to buy games, or borrow more?

Hey what I coincident I'm also Australian and enjoying the benefit of cheap import. I stopped buying local game about a year ago after realising just how much Aussie's are getting ripped off when compare to most other developed countries due to our high dollars. =)

Not at all, the only thing I did is working in fixed hours;.Before I had a job like a freelancer..;  but not really for the money ;..just to be sure to have a job;. with my 950 Euro a week I really don't have to change my gaming lifestyle;.

Not much at all.  There's other things I would cut first that are much less important to me than games, such as buying a box of nerds and a pop at a gas station a couple times a month, or other random expenditures such as that.  I could quite easily cut $20 or $30 from my monthly spending, which would very easily cover excess gas expenditures for a month during the summer for me.

It already HAS.  I don't think I've bought 5 games in the last 2 years.  It's been extremely difficult.

The economy would have a to get a LOT worse before it impacted my gaming budget...

Right the now the limiting factor into how many games I buy is how many good games come out and how much time I have to play those, not how much they cost...

We just finished paying the mortgage on the house this month too so we have a lot more disposable incoming available to us...

Congratulations!  I'm still dreading the day I have to start paying mortgage payments