Reuters Interpretation

Reuters reports that gaming is set to continue growing, despite the recession, this year, but that gamers are “spending more carefully” on higher-quality titles./

I puzzled over the meaning of this for a while, because there seem to be one or two possible interpretations: one is that there are more gamers buying the same AAA titles (if the number of “high-quality” games is roughly the same), or that the same rough number of gamers are buying more AAA titles (because there are more AAA titles to buy). 

Logically, you might suspect that a little of both is an issue, because in the same article, it points out that the average age of gamers is rising.  This is because people who started gaming in their youth are aging, while new gamers are continuously being added to the mix.  Unfortunately for Reuters, this really has nothing to do with a flight to quality and everything to do with simple demographics and a willingness to keep buying games in roughly the same proportion as before. 

Similarly, I think we would generally agree that there are more quality games on the market now than in the past.  That said, I don’t see any evidence in the article that people are actually buying more games on a per-capita basis than they did before (nor is that claim made in the article).  That would be an argument that people are willing to spend during the recession as long as new games are solid: a contention that may be perfectly valid but which is unsupported by evidence… most games in the February NPD top sales charts, aside from SFIV, are actually fairly old games like Wii Play and Wii Fit, Mario Kart and NSMB, which people are probably either snapping up at a discount or finally getting around to buying.  In either case, it’s not because of a flood of new, higher-quality games.

I’m picking on this Reuters article not necessarily because it’s wrong (we certainly can’t know that from the article), but because the idea that gamers are seeking higher-quality games in a recession seems like a plugged data point - someone figured out that revenues were rising, and so analysts rely on some pat, logical, and as yet unproven response to try to explain why.  (Indeed, the fact that people often lament the poor quality titles that sell well seems like an obvious counterexample.)  They may have reams of real data behind it, but it’s certainly not presented in the news piece.  This is a journalistic problem as well as potentially an analytical one.