look at that. Guess what was invented in 2002 smart guy.

And if the gaming industry is in decline, which it is because of the economy right now, it is only because the playstation broke all records and sent gaming into the biggest economy it's ever seen.

There will always be a large amount of those gamers still there, it's just that at the moment it's not as good as it was.

This guy shits on franchises again, thinking that original IPs and classics are the answer. Here's the real answer. This guy is mentally insane. How can you guys possibly believe in him?

First off, your chart on PC gaming only goes back to 1998, you're missing a huge chunk of time prior to that in which PC gaming had fallen from its highs. PC gaming at one point was nearly the entire gaming market, by 1998 it was a minority, this was long before piracy.

And your argument that Playstation sent things into the biggest economy and that's why its in decline is flawed, first off in terms of sales the PS1 generation was smaller than PS2 gens and Wii's gen will be even larger than PS2's in terms of sales, not to mention Handheld gaming is larger than before, so the Wii gen is going to send gaming even larger overall, in terms of sales and revenues, but that won't matter because profits aren't rising. Its not the economy, this was an issue back before the economy started to tank. The big issue is the fact that while sales and revenues have risen, profits have not, in fact profits have fallen as costs of gaming have risen faster than sales and revenues.

Nintendo is one of the few companies to figure this out, which is why they have mad profits and security for the future

PC gaming was almost the only kind of gaming at one point. Are you going to argue that it's industry did that to it?

PC gaming never sold a shit load of software, and revenue was minimal. Sure it had more of the industry, but it didn't make nearly as much as it does today.

Do you even look at the profits that people make on PC gaming? There are hugely successful companies in the PC gaming world. Companies like Pop Caps, and others that develop things like Yahoo! Literati, Bejeweled, and flash games. PC gaming is in decline mainly because the competition is so unbelievably huge. You know where that competition comes from? Those casual games. Those casual games that cost all of 5 thousand to make, and don't cost the consumer a penny. They make their money on ad revenue and donations.Back in the day, guess what? More free games, Muds Mushes and Moos, user generated mods and a thousand other things provided free content for everyone to use. Now PC gaming has another cancer, piracy. In 2002 bittorrent was invented, and pretty much sliced the revenue in half starting in 2002 and maximizing in 2004.

Second paragraph, yeah I know you're right. I actually thought the gaming industry was in decline. Big surprise! It's bigger than it's ever been. Yes we all know that the wii has a really good profit margin. We know that they took a smart way into this generation. But it's because of the industry that games have come so far in the first place. These generations wouldn't exist if dev's took the money route. Gaming, for the past 20 years has been all about upping the graphics and the hardware.

And here's the problem this gen: MS. MS deliberately put their console out a year in advance, forcing both nintendo and sony to release faster than they would have liked to. I don't know if you remember seeing the difference between a ps2 game and the fucking fight night game on the 360. 360 made past games look like trash. If you try to take the money route and go for extended generations, you will be in trouble from competitors trying to gain a graphical advantage. This forces the industry to take the cut off of profit margin. It's really nobody's fault in particular, but YOU WILL SEE, that as the graphical trend starts to hit this wall, that is, the point where hardware leaps don't really improve the graphics, then innovation will flourish. Those prices will come down, and things will reset again. Until there is another huge graphical leap, and there is another race to the top.

Without the HD systems there would be no HD wii in the making, because there wouldn't be a profit in it. Gaming will always continue, because there will always be a market for it, and that market will give the consumer what they want. New experiences, better graphics, and more technology. The market will adapt. If you think for one second that the level of innovation the wii gives is the only way, think again. 3d gaming is on the way. Natal is going to stir up some shit too. Gaming will continue to evolve, and the one thing that has the potential to destroy it, is the casual core, because for that group, online poker is enough, and online poker is free.

Console gaming will become what PC gaming has become, a mass of tetris clones, and stick figures fighting, with a couple high profile games that everyone continues to complain about.

Game developers running businesses in the form of partnerships or LLCs are free to make choices based upon quality and creativity. 

The executives and management of corporations, however, are not free to choose quality and creativity unless it also, in their business judgment, makes the most money possible for the corporation.  They literally are not free to choose anything but profit.  In their discretion they can consider things like the long-term benefits of maintaining a brand by producing quality games, but then again they are pressured to produce maximal profits in the near-term, however they can. 

It's the business form.  It likes money, and where money pulls away from quality, it chooses money.  This is what Nintendo has done in a sense, though their own games are still pretty well made: they chose money just in the sense of successfully gravitating to an untapped source of demand (casuals) only tangentially related to their audience in previous generatiions.  Yeah, they make money nowadays.  I tripled my money in Nintendo stock a couple years back, yay for us.  But as for playing a Wii...not so much.

  Ah but see you confirmed my point, companies that are making those small games like popcap are doing great, because they moved away from the whole high budget massively expensive games to smaller "casual" games, they still have piracy of those games, but profits for those companies are fine, the big budget games, there problem is not piracy, it was the fact that they were producing extremely expensive games, where making back the money would be difficult.

Nintendo doesn't have a graphical advantage, compared to the 360, heck its games are only slightly better looking than Xbox 1, yet it doesn't affect their sales or their profits.

We don't know if an HD Wii is in the making, I doubt it, as HD doesn't seem to play much of a role in terms of sales as the Wii is proving, your argument that we need to chase higher graphical power falls short, because as you yourself have admitted it the comnpanies that focus on the smaller simpler, cheaper games that experience greater success

The buying public are moron's ergo The gaming industry will not die (as Movie industry or Music industry)

Does that chart include sales from digital distrubters or subscription fees from MMORPGs?

@phoenix, probably not. It probably also does not include other forms of revenue.

@avinash
I'm starting to see where you are coming from, and I think it's one of the reasons people have trouble understanding you. You firmly believe in that shovelware model. Hey man, that's fine with me, I understand why. Those companies make quite a lot of dough, but here's the problem.

Casuals at the mean time (on consoles) buy some of the core games. They buy red faction, they buy SMG, and so on. As the casual model approaches higher levels, those casual gamers won't need to buy games like the ones mentioned, because there will be some simpler games that do a similar job for free. This then introduces a large disparity in profit for the developers of the two types of games.
This is what happened to the PC game industry. Although, it did have some help from advanced piracy levels and the internet too. The consoles might not ever see a trend like this happen. Perhaps this is why Nintendo has done things the way they have. Maybe they know that this trend can't happen on consoles, and so that's why they abandoned the seal of quality. Or maybe they want to be the first ones to kill it!! gasp*

There will be a wii HD next generation, because the hardcores have made it possible by funding the technology and fueling the price wars this generation. There will always be a hardcore market in gaming because consoles just seem to work with gaming better than PCs do, somehow. If you think for one second that your fellow members on this site would be happy with mahjong and hearts, you are sadly mistaken. No console gamer wants that future. Ask anybody in here. Nobody wants the shovelware model.

At the end of my rant, I continue to profess that this man (malgrom) is inane, asinine, insane, and an ass, and he needs to be put in a mental hospital or prison, seeing as how he tries so hard to write like letters from the underground. Gaming will never fall, unless it is to bear the weight of some great misfortune like nuclear winter.