Activision's Eric Hirschberg believes that the drop in games is not directly related to the troubles with the world's economies.

Hirschberg explained that the change in amount of time gamers are spending on their games can explain the drop in games sales.

He began: "Gamers seem to want to spend more time on, and go deeper into, fewer games. They're gaming more - all of the metrics in terms of number of uniques, number of hours spent, all those are up. Hardware install base is up. If you look at all the graphs, it's hard to argue that economic turbulence is the driver, because people are still buying new Xboxes and PS3s at a record clip. We get 20 million unique players every month. The shift is that the games have gotten deeper, and as we've seen this shift to connected play, the tail on games is a lot longer than it used to be."

"I think that, as much as anything else, has decreased the demand for new IP," Hirschberg added. "Just a few years back, when there wasn't that long tail of connected play, you'd buy a game, roll through the campaign, roll through the various play modes. Maybe you'd do it again, but then you'd be done with it. There'd be very few games, maybe the games would be the exception, like the Maddens and the FIFAs, where you'd just continue to play them all year round. But now you're seeing that more and more with these strategies and a lot more connected play. This is something we're learning from gamers. Just because it's part of an existing franchise, doesn't mean it's not innovative, doesn't mean we're not bringing new ideas."

Thanks GamesIndustry.biz.

By Ewan Aiton