The Warp Pipe

Video games face the prospect of slipping back to third place in the UK entertainment race following a report showing that the sector has suffered bigger declines than either video or music in the first half of 2010. The ERA says that the first six months of the year have seen music sales increase by 1.7 per cent in volume to 64.3m units and 0.4 per cent in value to £522.4m. Video has seen sales value climb by 0.6 per cent to £852.5m despite a 1.4 per cent unit sale drop to 98m units. Games, however, saw unit sales slump 12.5 per cent at 23.8m and sales value fall by 10.1 per cent to £532.6m.

I haven’t spoken with Mark today, but I’d wager he thought the comment was silly that only indy devs reply or interact to customers. – Cliffy B.

You know what would be nice? To see Mark Rein actually respond to this issue. You know, since he’s the guy that stirred up the trouble to begin with.

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“We’ve had very good years, (but falling demand) is part, I suppose, of the cycle, the whole industry as such. We’re not recession proof. We’ve probably as an industry been better than other industries. We obviously would like to be selling more and it has declined. But the whole market has as well so it’s not just ourselves,. We think there’s still plenty of opportunity for the product. There are a lot of people still waiting to get into gaming because I think there’s a lot of interest from older people, people that normally didn’t game, and we’ve got some innovations on the way as well.” – Nintendo UK general manager David Yarnton

Mr. Yarnton also took a jab at Kinect and Move…

“There are no real new models coming out as such. No leapfrogging. They’re just derivatives of the original versions they’ve had. We still with Wii have got a lot of technology we haven’t fully harnessed and a lot of development coming of games that I think will still wow people when they see it.”

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