Crash

As I've mentioned before the video game industry is expanding in that there are more systems are selling each year. However, with the cost that companies are incurring in creating these video games most companies are losing money. For instance, Microsoft lost over four billion dollars with the Xbox. In short, even with the industry expanding, competition is also expanding and there simply aren't enough systmes being sold. So why is this? One article I looked at explored several reasons on why the video game industry is crashing. The two reasons I found most compelling were that the older generation of gamers are doing just that, growing old and not buying any more video games. The second reason I found most compelling was the concept that video games have gone so far with graphics they can't really improve that much more these days.
The first problem is that there is a certain market that the video game market appeals to. This market in reality is pretty stale. There will be those who enjoy playing games in the virtual world and those who don't. Yes it is true that you can develop new consumers and new markets through marketing to them but in the end the entire concept of spending hours going through a virtual story just won't appeal to some people. The idea here is that the people who began buying the Atari when they were young are now too old to realistically buy a new system. While it is true that 25% of gamers are over the age of 30, I'd bet most of those users are on their last system, meaning that they might enjoy games from Gamecube that they played in thier mid twenties but aren't going to buy the next generation system. This is mainly because they don't have time to play through hours of storylines when a lot of the game is based on replication so that they can beat the boss. So with these new generation systems needing more systems to sell to make money, will they be able to as they lose so much of their market in the upcoming years.
The other compelling point was that in terms of graphics games haven't really gone that far in the last ten years. Recently systems are braggin on the fact that cloth and people will look that much more real. Is that the reason we're playing these games in the first place? Aren't we playing because we're controlling a virtual world. This in my mind is a proven point and can be so clearly shown in the pictures used in the article. The game "Goldeneye" looked just about as good as most games these days, it just had a different storyline, in fact probably one that was much more in depth and compelling to users.
In the end, I understand that the industry is growing, the question is it growing quickly enough with the loss of the old generation gamers to continue to make profit? What is it doing besides providing us cleaner graphics and bigger blood spills to keep us coming back?