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abstract: "This paper examines video game sales by platform in the North American market from a period spanning 2006 through 2011. As the home video game industry has rapidly matured and become established as a forefront facet of interactive entertainment in the home, we seek to determine what aspects of the video game market seem to most impact sales. This question is particularly poignant as the maturation of the video game industry has witnessed efforts at both vertical integration and horizontal expansion on the part of the top game publishers and developers in hopes of solidly grounding the industry. This study employs a Kruskal-Wallis test to compare eight different gaming platforms. The results indicate Nintendo's Wii and DS are the top selling game platforms, Xbox 360 is in a second tier, multiple Sony PlayStation platforms are in the third tier, personal computer games are in tier four, and the retired sixth generation Nintendo GameCube is the lowest sales tier."

Sales of physical games on decrease compared with digital games

"a pay-what-you-want [game] sale that lets consumers decide how much money to give to developers and how much to donate to charities"

"In this study we build and analyze corpora of internet message board discussions and use this analysis to build a model that attempts to predict videogame sales figures. Weekly corpora are built by downloading and processing text consisting of the discussions of a large community focused on the topic of videogames. This text is then analyzed to determine which videogame titles generate the most discussion within the community for each week. We use support vector regression to create a model that is able to make predictions about future sales figures"

"When Nintendo announced last week that it would soon start offering the majority of its retail 3DS and Wii U games as digital downloads, it represented a major change in policy for the company. But buried in the announcement was what could possibly be an even more significant change in Nintendo's relationship with brick and mortar retailers."

Retail sales decline, and a conversation between two industry experts on the medium's prospects

"what makes a video game replayable and why exactly the replayability of a game should matter to the companies producing the games and the consumers buying them. Information on replayability is very important to both the companies producing games and the consumers purchasing them. It is necessary for companies to achieve a balance in the amount of replayability a video game possesses. In other words, companies should aim for a certain ―value‖ of game play per dollar. If a game is not replayable, consumers will quickly tire 7 of the game and discard it, as it does not have high replay value. This takes away from the popularity of the game and possible sales from future games in the same series. On the other hand, if the game is too replayable, the consumer may not feel a need to buy any more games and video game companies will be unable to generate a profit. For companies, the value of the game requires a delicate balance to produce a game which will keep players interested long enough for the company to develop a new game before they tire of the game they have, but not too long so that when the company release the new game the buyers are in line waiting for it."

Los Angeles-based British video games designer Jolyon Myers, inset, was a key programmer on the wildly successful Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. MW3 beat all sales records at the end of last year, earning $400m in its first day of sales and reaching $1bn in 16 days.

"The swift migration of gamers such as Ingegneri from costly consoles to smartphones and tablets, where games are often free or 99 cents, is causing a tectonic shift in the video game industry that has hit a burgeoning sector of the Massachusetts economy especially hard. Two Massachusetts game makers abruptly closed in October, sales of console-based games are plummeting, and game makers are struggling to resize games designed for large screens so they will perform as well on a smaller window. "

"Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that gamemakers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter are lawyers and World of Warcraft players who created the world's first course on gamification at the Wharton School. In their book, they reveal how game thinking?addressing problems like a game designer?can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a 6-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more."

Comparison of mobile gaming with traditional console games and industry figures

From the article: "actively directing people to pirate his game using the Torrent link posted on The Pirate Bay, and asking them to donate whatever they want in return. Further, the pay-what-you-want sale is being actively promoted on the front page of The Pirate Bay, where tens of millions of visitors will see a short, conciliatory message from Sosowski (seen above). "I know that not everyone can afford entertainment. But everyone needs it," the message reads in part. "And even though I make games for a living. I am most happy just to see people enjoy them. So today, you can download a torrent of my game. And if you like it, throw some coins in my general direction."

Application of political economics to the study of video game industry business models

Economist overview of mass growth of video game sales and usage

An industry report from BMO Capital Markets (October 2011)

Abstract Berry (1994) and some later papers provide a way to estimate dierentiated product models. When the product of interest is a durable good, consumers do not pay the entire retail price due to the existence of the second hand market. This paper employs data from the US video game market and proposes a new angel to investigate the demand side of a durable good. The results of the empirical investigation suggests that the inclusion of the future resale price makes the model estimation more sensible and reasonable.