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According to members of the toy industry who met this week at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in Germany, the global decline in video game sales is permanent, while the popularity of traditional toys like board games is on the rise.
Richard Gottlieb, a US consultant who chaired the Building Our Future conference at the gathering, said that board games would rise to fill in the gap left by declining video game sales because "Board games are cross-generational. They bring the family together. Children get a tremendous sense of self-satisfaction from being able to beat their parents in a game."
Gottlieb pointed to the rise in popularity in the US of more complex board games like Settlers of Catan (which also has a video game adaptation) as evidence that board games are coming back into vogue. He also cited games like Farmville as driving down interest in retail games - the logic being that as free games gain popularity, consumers will be less willing to pay for digital game content.
Gottlieb and the other experts at the Nuremberg Toy Fair offered no hard numbers to back up their claims that traditional board games will take up the market segment lost by video games, but I can see the thought behind it. Unlike video games, physical board games can't be made available for free or pirated. But the decline in sales of video games is widely attributed to the economy, not a lack of interest in digital games. For the decline in game sales to become permanent, they will have to stay down after the economy rebounds, something that no analyst is willing to predict when video games are more a part of daily life than ever before.
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