Economic Slowdown? ’What economic slowdown?’ says the local video game industry with a total of $1.96 billion dollars being made in the last financial year. This total is made even more impressive as it’s an increase of 47 percent over 2007. .

Hardware wise Nintendo sold through 680k Wii units in 2008 which now puts it past a million - this puts the pathetic 160k the GameCube did to shame.  Equally as shaming is the Nintendo DS which sold 800,000 last year to be the best selling console for the third year in a row. 

The Xbox 360 and PS3 sit on 500,00 and 400,00 – although we can’t really trust Sony’s figures as we don’t know if they include PS3’s given away in promotion of which at least 40,000 or more could be attributed too. So what is driving this boom?

According to GFK it’s the sales of ‘Family Games’ which have grown by 137 per cent. Action games follow in on second place, so what are we buying? Well it seems to be a close split. Sales of games were up 57 percent last year but it seems more people purchased consoles as well with a 43 per cent increase in hardware sales. Accessories, the true money maker, were up 68 per cent.

The huge increase on all fronts has largely been attributed to Nintendo and their efforts to expand their audience. According to Ron Curry, CEO of the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia, the results highlight the strength of Australia’s video and computer gaming industry and that entire households are now engaging in interactive entertainment. "We have definitely moved past the days of the stereotypical gamer", he said.

Source: News.com.au, figures via GFK.