VIDEO games are big business.
The industry is worth around $80 billion, and although games can be played on
PCs and phones, the industry is still dominated by dedicated consoles. A good
candidate for the earliest games console is the Magnavox Odyssey, released in
1972, predating the home version of Atari's early blockbuster "Pong" by three
years and selling 300,000 units—an impressive tally for something which could
not even generate sound. With every "generation" of consoles (a somewhat
abitrary system for grouping machines with similar release dates and roughly
equivalent power) total sales rose steadily. The industry grew up when Sony
released its PlayStation machine in 1994. Sony's great innovation was to market
its machine not at children, but at men in their early 20s who had grown up with
video games. Its successor, the PlayStation 2, remains the best-selling console
ever produced. Today the industry is dominated by three companies: Nintendo,
Sony and Microsoft. It has been seven years since any of those firms have
released a new console. Now, though, three new machines are arriving more or
less at once. Nintendo's Wii U was released in November 2012 and in February
Sony unveiled details for its PlayStation 4. Microsoft is set to confirm the
newest version of its Xbox console on May 21st. But they launch into a market in
turmoil. Games designed for mobile phones, web browsers and tablets are growing
fast, while sales of console games are lagging.
