Game consoles have become a very important business pillar for the trade in electronical devices the potential of which is by far not exhausted: over the first six months of 2008 Germans bought 1.7 million consoles, in particular Xbox, Playstation and Wii. This is a plus of 400.000 devices as compared to the same period in 2007 and corresponds to an increase by about 30%. Not only the number of pieces sold increased but also turnover.
In the first half of 2008 turnover generated in Germany increased to 356 million Euros while this figure had been just 268 million Euros for the first six months of 2007. This was the positive message which the German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) sent to manufacturers and merchants in the run-up to the Games Convention trade fair which will take place from August 20th to 24th in Leipzig.
BITKOM expects new records to be set at the end of 2008 as well. It predicts turnover to increase by presumably 6.3% to 889 million Euros by the end of this year (in 2007: 836 million), the number of pieces sold to grow by 4.5% to 4.3 million (2007: 4.1 million). Thus, the number of games consoles sold almost doubled within a couple of years. In the year 2003 manufacturers sold just 2.2 million pieces.
It seems that manufacturers with their high-performance multi-media devices also succeeded in reaching new target groups different from young computer players. Certainly instrumental in achieving this is the fact that users may not just play on games consoles. These are also suitable for listening to music, watching videos in high-resolution quality and they also provide access to the internet. But also new game concepts such as karaoke and quizz games which particularly address women and elderly people contributed to the overall success of games consoles.