FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German video gamers, long wedded to their personal computers, are switching to games consoles and mobile devices, pushing German games software sales up 21 percent to 1.36 billion euros ($2.1 billion) last year.

The German games software association (BIU) said on Friday sales of games for consoles such as the Nintendo (7974.OS) Wii, Sony (6758.T) PlayStation or Microsoft (MSFT.O) Xbox rose 38 percent to 904 million euros in 2007.

By contrast, sales of PC games slipped 3 percent to 458 million euros.

Games for mobile devices were the fastest-growing segment of the market, with sales rising 65 percent to 360 million euros as more casual gamers entered the market, the BIU said.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Erica Billingham)

Who buys mobile games??? Does that mean mobile phone or handheld??? If they buy handheld games, then that's normal...But cell phone games? YUCK

run germans run to the ps3 !!

when they say mobile devices do they mean cell phone games? or psp games or ds games.

mobile would be cell phone.

and yes, we seem to switch slowly. a friend of mine replaced his pc gaming hobby with a wii. pc gaming is just too expensive.

I'm guessing mobile devices includes DS, PSP, cell phones, etc, since they weren't included in the other two categories.

Oh noes 3%. PC gaming is doomed. Apparently so is console gaming since it's being dwarfed by mobile gaming.

I am quite sure with mobile devices they are only talking cell phones and similars, if they would include the handhelds that market would certainly be bigger than the home console market.

selling games for cell phones is extremely profitable because the market is huge and you can sell very simple games millions of times. And I mean, there are about 80 million people in germany, let's say that 60 million of them have a cell phone (probably this is way too low) and the market is 360 million euro as the article states. That makes 6 euro per cell phone user, and if you further assume that a game costs 3 euro that makes two games per mobile phone user which is really not that much.

 wtf are you talking about a $450 computer can run everything but crysis.  I should know as my computer cost me $450.

btw they aren't taking into consideration Steam or any other DL services.

Plus when there has been only like 3 or 4 games worth purchasing in the last 5 months on the PC that kinda points to something.

 well, thats what he stated was his reason to switch. also, technology is a bit more expensive over here.

 @naz: since when is 360 million euro > 904 million euro?