Top 10 of 2009: News
What were the key stories running through the past year? Find out here
Number 3: The Market Declines
The videogames industry has been on a pretty solid run in the past decade or so, and more recently the stellar year-on-year growth has resulted in an impression that, even when the rest of the financial world was falling apart, the games business was pretty safe overall.
After all, while the macroeconomic situation had deteriorated significantly from the middle of 2008 onwards, NPD reported record levels of growth in the US market last year, with almost a quarter of the USD 21 billion revenues in the region coming in December alone.
That said, nobody would have been to surprised when the first signs of weakness came along in March - sales were down by 17 per cent compared to March 2008, despite Resident Evil 5 selling nearly 1 million units.
But that - along with a hardware sales decline of 18 per cent - could easily be explained away by the Easter holiday falling in April in 2009, along with massive-seller Super Smash Bros Brawl. All was still well, nothing too much to worry about.
However, the comparisons for April were worse - software down 23 per cent - although this time it was the fault of GTA IV and Mario Kart Wii, which sold unusually large numbers in the same month in 2008. Another solid reason for the decline.
But May didn't offer any reassurance, with hardware down 30 per cent on 2008 - the Wii alone down by 57 per cent in the month - while June saw software down by 29 per cent.
July and August showed no signs of bucking the trend, and it wasn't until September that the 1.5 million selling Halo: ODST actually dragged the software numbers up for the first time in five months - but only by 5 per cent.
October was unremarkable, and even 6 million-selling Modern Warfare 2 couldn't prevent a revenue decline over the previous year of 3 per cent in November, while the latest information indicates a decline of almost 11 per cent for the calendar year as a whole.
Of course, that's just the US - but with other markets showing strong growth in 2008, perhaps the rest of the world would make up for it? Sadly not. Japan continued its long descent, while unpublished information from other key markets show a rough mirroring of the US data.
So what's really to blame? Was it simply that, on a month-by-month basis 2008 was the perfect storm, and while 2009 has suffered by comparison, it's still mostly fine?
Not really. The key losers across the year were, according to some, the music games genre and Nintendo-based products. NPD details put the former down 52 per cent in the six months to the end of November, while the latter dropped by 11 per cent.
When you factor the revenue involved in some of those high price point products - Wii Fit (with the balance board), Rock Band and Guitar Hero (with instruments) - it's no surprise that as consumers spent less money overall, they would be the first to be hit.
In fact, argues Broadpoint AmTech's Ben Schachter, the core games market grew by 17 per cent in the last six months, which should be great news for everybody - as that's a far better indicator of the strength of the underlying market foundations.
Of course, whether you're swayed by the headline NPD numbers or the underlying core market, the truth is somewhere in-between. Staying in might be the new going out, and videogames may well offer the best value in the entertainment space - but asking gamers to pay high initial prices isn't going to stick in a tight economy.
Naturally, there's another upside to a year of decline - year-on-year comparisons will be that much easier in 2010...