If you’re the type to worry about an American economy that continues to hobble along like an octogenarian centipede and chew your nails over that looming fiscal cliff that we keep hearing about, well, I have two words to calm your nerves … at least for a moment or two.
Video games. Enough said.
Yep, it looks like video games have eclipsed plastics as the hope for the economic future. Sure, you may have heard that even the gaming industry is suffering, but the numbers tend to say otherwise. You want examples? Come closer.
According to the Entertainment Software Association, the game-building industry doubled its revenue income between 2005 and 2010. (Our national gross domestic product, on the other hand, only edged up a mere 16%.) Hey, in 2011 alone, the industry sold a whopping 245.6 million games in the U.S., bringing in a cool $7.3 billion.
Recent big sellers sorta plop a cherry on the idea. For instance, the latest sci-fi shooter favorite, Halo 4, just came out last week and raked in a reported $220 million dollars in the first 24 hours of release (while expecting at least $300 mil in the first week). And that’s a game that was released on only one console: the Xbox 360. To put those numbers in perspective, Halo 4 earned more on its first day than The Avengers—which had the biggest opening ever—earned during its first weekend.
Now consider the new Call of Duty game (Call of Duty: Black Ops II) that just came out this week for all the major consoles. They haven’t released numbers yet, but over the last several years of COD releases, each successive game has eclipsed the record its predecessor broke the year before. There were literally hundreds of thousands of rabid fans lined up for the game’s midnight release a few days ago and they expect its first 24-hour cash-register tally to be somewhere north of $400 million. That’s closing in on half-a-billion bucks in a day, gang. And those are only two of the big-name games being released this fall for the upcoming holiday season.
I don’t know about you, but I’m accentuating the positive. I’m thinking, first the game makers will feel the boost, then the soda and potato chip industry, then a bump for the makers of NoDoz and Bengay (to keep gamers awake and limber). And before you know it the economy will be roaring and the jobs will be plenty.
Then, we’ll just have to figure out how to pry the game controllers out of the hands of the unemployed.
Recent Comments