Our economy and it's video game sales

[DustinT]

Reading through the forums I always see this topic brought up....sales are low because of the economy.

I believe, and so do most members. But what I don't understand is how people try and compare a sports video game's sales to the sales of an FPS. FPSs have and always will be more popular, because regardless of what we want to believe, sports games are not high on everybody's list.

Just a random thought I had in my head. Discuss.

[Burns11]

Re: Our economy and it's video game sales

Up until these past two years (2007, 2008), Madden has pretty much always topped the sales charts. Of the top 10 selling games of all time (from the NPD) in the US there are two FPS (Halo 2 and CoD4), 4 versions of Madden, 3 GTAs and Guitar Hero 3. If you look at 2005, half of the top 10 for that year are EA Sports titles.

I do agree though, that FPS sales and sports game sales are differing topics, but more because of their respective audience and not really because they are more popular. FPS fans tend to skew towards the hardcore gamer types that would make sure they bought their FPS but might pass on the derivative yearly editions of a sports game, especially when that game fails to improve for a few years. The Madden/sports game crowd would skew more towards the the casual gamer, the type of gamer more likely to withhold a purchase of a game in this economy and one who might eschew the game when the hardcore crowd they like to play with moves on but can't afford the console to follow.