I don’t get to legitimately toot my own horn here, but we here at Binge Gamer have been screaming that, with developers dropping off the map left and right and one publisher (Midway) staring death in the face, the industry is in a recession for weeks if not months now.

It’s glad that the NPD Group agrees with our assessment.

While media outlets like CNN have pondered whether or not video games are “recession proof”, NPD Group has looked at the hard numbers and come to the conclusion that while the video game industry as a whole is doing well, it has indeed been affected by the recession.

The game industry is growing, but it has been impacted by the recession… We probably would have seen even more growth if it hadn’t been impacted by the current economic climate in the U.S.

While the industry, as a whole, is doing well, the success is what I’d call “top heavy”. Big time publishers and developers like Harmonix (who earn income off DLC) are raking in the dough, but the smaller development houses are dropping like flies. Look at Free Radical. A great developer who made a single bad game (Haze) and it paid for it with the company. Same thing with Lair and Factor 5. Smaller developers that are trying to come into the limelight with new IPs are living and dying by their game’s success — more now than ever.

…unless you develop games on the Wii. I’m pretty sure some of those only cost a couple hundred bucks — however much Adobe Dreamweaver costs, in any case.

via GameDaily

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