Reggie: Population Drives Industry Growth

Reggie, the colorful VP of Sales and Marketing at Nintendo of America, has made a statement that might persuade you that a “Revolution” is indeed necessary. According to his data given at Nintendo’s press summit, video game household penetration has not increased over the past 20 years.

Let’s look at the install base for the last four generations. First thing to note: As recently as about a year ago, projections were made that the current generation would reach 60 Million household penetration: Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen. So this chart is pure number of units sold. It doesn’t take into account duplicate ownership, and doesn’t take into account population growth. You overlay those two facts to get a percent population with a console in the household, and that’s what it looks like. 8 Bit years, 31% of households had a gaming system. This year, where is going to end up? Somewhere between 31-32%. The growth we have seen has been driven by population growth, and by duplicate ownership.

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Reggie went on to say:

This is a study from Piper Jalfray. They have been doing this for the last three half-yearly installments. This looks at young teens, and who is increasing their game play, and who is decreasing their game play; just a rough measure. The red is the percent of teens that are saying they are decreasing the amount of time they are playing games. It’s gone up; gone up fairly consistently every time they have run this study. And the amount of teens that say they have increased their game play have been stagnant, and down fairly substantially from fall of 04.

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