Games industry cool to slowdown blues

By Sarah Williams

The games industry is booming, helped by new peripherals that ratchet up the realism on your Xbox, PS3 or WiiMatt Bingham.

House prices might be plummeting and car sales dwindling but one sector is bucking the global economic trend: the video games industry has never had it so good. Gamers bought a record 82.8m titles in 2008. That’s a 26% increase on the previous year, making the UK the second-biggest games market in the world behind America. Analysts from Gfk Chart-Track, the British research company that published the report, say that as consumers hunker down at home, 2009 is likely to be another bumper year. Britain isn’t alone in experiencing a gaming boom. Last year global revenue from games software added up to an estimated $32 billion enough to overtake DVD sales for the first time.

The reasons for this growth aren’t hard to fathom. Just as cinema audiences grew during the Great Depression of the 1930s when people sought out good-value entertainment, so the recession is making gaming all the more attractive.

Games designers have been quick to capitalise on the trend by making their titles all the more complex and adding online play, extending their titles lifetimes. But its the accessories market thats really taking off. An entire industry now supplies add-on hardware for Xboxes, PlayStations, Wiis and PCs, bringing unprecedented levels of realism to gaming.

The first step for most gamers trading up their hardware to enjoy these cinematic games is to invest in a bigger, higher-resolution TV. But for a dream gaming setup, only a projector will do. Forget memories of dusty slide-shows on a wobbly screen; todays gaming projectors will splash a bright, high-definition image onto a wall at a size far larger than any TV set.

The most elaborate games pay a great deal of attention to audio design, and to do them justice a dedicated sound system is needed. Many titles support 5.1 sound a subwoofer, a central speaker and four satellite surround-sound speakers which is particularly useful for alerting players to sneak attacks in action games. Philips amBX system even adds lighting and air effects from fans to the audio mix, although hardcore gamers turn to the pinpoint accuracy of surround-sound headphones.

But the current cutting edge of gaming is 3-D. At the giant Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas earlier this year, Sony demonstrated a 3-D version of the Gran Turismo driving game running on a standard PS3. Already available to buy in America at least is the GeForce 3D Vision system from Nvidia, the graphics card manufacturer. The card is compatible with more than 300 existing PC games, and splits the video signal sent to a 2-D monitor into the familiar red and blue channels used for 3-D films. Seen through the glasses that are included, driving games such as Burnout Paradise and first-person shooters such as Left 4 Dead become much more playable, with furniture such as maps and personal statistics floating eerily in the players peripheral vision. Threats and fast-moving objects, meanwhile, become easier to spot. The Nvidia kit costs $199. Expect many more innovations such as this to filter down from the PC gaming world into the next generation of consoles. The film industry had little competition in 1930s when it came to exciting, affordable entertainment; this time it’s got a fight on its hands.