As you may know from some of my previous posts, I have four sons who love to play video games. Whether I hear explosion blasts blaring from my living room speakers from a heated game of “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” or see one of my sons drop to their knees after defeat in a close tennis match of “Wii: Sports,” I’m quite familiar with the sights and sounds of console, PC, and portable device gaming. Other methods of gaming are certainly starting to gain favor in my house, and while traditional devices still reign supreme, there are instances where I take note of the growing use of these other devices. Read more »
Well, it seems that the holiday season is in full swing. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but the sounds of the holidays are around us everywhere in television ads, Internet gimmicks (”Have you elf’d yourself yet?”) and if you’re a Gleek like me, you soaked up every minute of this week’s holiday-themed episode. One of my favorite Christmas songs from my youth was “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” Well, with three weeks of open-ended responses in from our KIDS tracker, I can tell you that “teeth” is one of the few things that has yet to show up even once on kids’ wish list items.
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Last week, when The NPD Group posted video game industry sales results for March, one could almost hear the collective sigh of relief among stakeholders; that after a fairly long drought, there was some good news to report. The industry recorded a gain of 6 percent in total revenues generated, and along with that top line gain, several records were noted as well. For me, it’s always more fun to report good news than bad, so here are just a few of the stories pulled from analysis of the data:
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The highly anticipated video game industry sales results for September have now been delivered, and many who were expecting a bigger increase over last year’s results, were underwhelmed by the numbers. The industry did return to positive territory after six consecutive months of posting declines, but the increase was a modest 1 percent.
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Kids. I spend a lot of time thinking about them. Not only do I have four of my own under the age of 12, but the two industries I cover count kids as a primary target audience: 33% of video game industry dollar sales since May ‘08 have been spent against kids ages 14 and under while this same group comprised 82% of 2008 toy industry dollar sales. With both of these industries representing approximately $22 billion in annual sales; that’s a lot of spending influenced by kids across those two industries alone.
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When I least expected it, BAM! Something hit me over the head like the proverbial ton of bricks. I was sitting at a conference in January listening to a panel discussion on kids and their use of the Internet. As usual, Internet safety concerns came up time and time again. Amongst the largely PC panelists, one more outspoken gentleman was talking about what kids were really doing on the Internet, and the pains they take to hide these things from their parents, especially their mothers. While moms rule the household and largely set the rules and cultural agendas, dads will tell great stories about the things they got away with when THEY were kids, and most likely rebel against mom’s household rules themselves. And that’s when it hit me - I am totally un-cool.
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Consumer Technology, Entertainment, Wireless | Anita Frazier, Entertainment Industry Analyst Toys & Video Games | 
September 7, 2011 1:41 pm | 
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