Study: Americans spent $25.3 billion on games in 2009

oops, read that from the pie of france, and no one cares about the french.

Mais le fromage!

I went from the Fable III article to this, which I think for some reason triggered the town criers voice inside my head when I read 'the pie of france'.

Doesn't make sense to me either. I'm going to go jump in a game portal, buh bye.

suc le bleu!!

Well technically this report is based on the company ASKING PC gamers how much they spent. "Did you buy that game?" "Uh... yea!"

Just kidding, but you have to take that into account. (read how they gathered the info, this isn't based on actual sales)

i'd say MMO's and GAMEPORTALS counts for the PC-chunk. I'm a pc-gamer at heart so i'm very glad about that positive pc stats.

Yes gamer girls dressed in WoW costumes surrounded by chubby wizards too nervous to hit on them. You should be fine with competition like that.

Grand Theft Wagon comes out later this month dude, that's basically GTA5.

I think he means Gran Turismo 5.

Also, weren't you just advertising the same podcast on a different account? Was it banned or something?

...if so, I'd take that as a hint.

Yea, I meant Gran Turismo 5. lol I hope it does come out this Christmas for sure though. I might buy a G37 wheel just for it. It's gonna be well worth it.

For the purpose of the report, game portals basically is another way of saying the casual PC game market (any game not directly installed to your hard drive). So all browser games, Facebook games, etc.

Kind of makes sense to split out from the regular PC gaming market for research purposes.

Maybe the Congo is Niche.

Depends on how you define "niche". It doesn't seem like defining it by $ spent is a good metric. Think about it, someone may buy a $30K car and that would likely dwarf their money spent on gaming even if they play games every day.

I like crunching numbers like this because it helps me imagine how much cooler games could be if there was more money in the industry, if games were more culturally popular. Americans spent almost twice as much money on their pets ($48 billion) in 2009 than on video games. I like pets and all, but they're not as cool as video games ;) And another article I found says that Americans spent $30 billion on casino gambling in 2009. I find casino culture to be... umm... somewhat depressing, so to see that people like casinos more than video games is a bummer.

And while I couldn't find a good estimate of the US auto industry revenues for 2009, I believe it's at least $500 billion domestically (at least $1 trillion globally). I also think that a huge chunk of auto industry revenue (maybe 25%?) is based on "luxury" sales, that is, people buying luxury features and cars that are not necessary but simply desired for various personal reasons.

Imagine if we could move that 25% of luxury car revenue into the gaming business (I see gaming as a luxury activity so I think the transfer here makes some sense). An extra $125 billion into the game biz.

But instead we have a gaming business which most people just aren't too into. It seems like games are seen as fairly trivial. Most people would much rather invest huge sums of money into status symbol luxury items like fancy cars, than in games.

(And regarding the Congo, with its 70 million people: apparently the US video game industry made more money in 2009 than the entire nation of Congo did. It only has a GDP of $11 billion. Wow. Call of Duty MW2's revenue in the US alone is the equivalent of perhaps 15% of the entire Congolese economy. Yea...)