2005 seemed to be the year when the video games market get hot. New online services, with the noted success of multi-player gaming got a lot of airtime and portable games devices from Sony's PSP to Nokia's Ngage opened up new categories. Even the good old cellphone seemed destined to become a hard core gaming device.
Now that 2005 has ended one can look back at the year and spot reality from hype as well as some clearly emerging trends going forwards. And it seems to have been a year of divergence, where portable devices did well, but consoles slumped.
For video games publishers enjoyed a record-breaking year in 2005 in the US in spite of a 12% fall in software sales for consoles, according to NPD, the leading provider of statistics for the industry.
The strong performance was credited to growth in the portable games market, said NPD, which offset the declines in the console market.
And numbers are also coming in for Microsoft's new Xbox 360 sales since it was launched in Nov. It seems as though Microsoft has only sold 600,000 devices so far. Given that they want to sell around 5M by June it looks to me like they could be a little behind. And they even have production problems meeting this level of supply, for finding an Xbox 360 in the US is still a challenge today.
So where's it all going? Well, portable video device and software sales should keep growing and more and more games will get bought and used by mobile phones. And this year console sales should nudge back up as people upgrade to the Xbox 360 (once Microsoft get over their supply challenges) and the Playstation 3 and new Nintendo consoles get released later this year.
Next year look for multi-player and online games to start taking hold, once players are armed and skilled with their new generation consoles.
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