The Future Of The CD: Mario-Assisted Marketing?

super-mario-bros-2-nes-title-screen.jpgDo you still buy CDs? Do you also spend dozens of pale, friendless hours a week attempting to find warp zones and stomp mushrooms wearing Charlie Chaplin shoes? Have you ever thought there might be a correlation between the two? No? Well there might be, according to entertainment industry analysts who think the record-selling biz needs to take advantage of the ever-expanding audience still willing to pay for video games.

“While it’s true that growth was centered on gaming last year, core gamers–those who played video games daily or several times each week–still spent most of their entertainment budgets on non-gaming entertainment,” the NPD Group states. “These consumers remain more likely to buy a DVD or CD than they are to purchase a new video game. In fact, 58 percent had purchased a new DVD in the past six months, 46 percent bought a CD, and 43 percent purchased a game for a console…

“It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that all of these entertainment categories are interlaced with one another, and they are all separately vying for a larger share of consumers’ leisure time and wallet share,” said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. “New technologies, new devices, and digital-content delivery are changing the entertainment landscape in such a way that companies must keep tabs on the latest trends in competitive categories–not just on their own entertainment sectors…”

“We have this perception of hard-core gamers glued to their consoles, and immersed in virtual worlds, when in fact, they are still spending a lot of time with, and money on, music, movies, and other pastimes,” Crupnick continues. “To be a winner in the entertainment wars, companies need to make sure they lead at every consumer touch point–from traditional retail to digital to wireless. In doing so, they stand a better chance of increasing their share of the time and money consumers choose to spend on their products.”

Nostalgia for physical formats/record company digit-intractability aside, downloads might still be the way to go for any future music/game industry reacharounds, because if I could somehow get music to a video game console that also played DVDs I might not bother leaving the house for the two hours a day that I bother venturing into the sunlight as it is. Also are we ever gonna get a Mega Man game for the Wii or what?

Gamers Still Hot And Heavy For CDs, DVDs [Ars Technica]

 
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  1. axel_f  |   Posted on Mar 13th, 2008

    yep, i’ll buy anything that has any sort of connection to super mario 2.

  2. Charlie Kerfelds Jetsons Tee  |   Posted on Mar 13th, 2008

    @axel_f: Not me.

    That being said, I’ll buy anything that has any sort of connection to “Doki Doki Panic.”

    [en.wikipedia.org]

  3. sparkletone  |   Posted on Mar 13th, 2008

    You can already get music and video stuff to your 360 or PS3 quite easily either by plugging in a USB hard drive, or streaming stuff over your local network (which I do all the time).

    As far as DVD playing goes… The PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PS3 all play DVDs and the Wii is supposed to be able to… eventually.

  4. SuperUnison  |   Posted on Mar 13th, 2008

    I think he just discovered that a lot of us who waste our lives on media waste it on several different kinds of media. If he’d been drinking heavily while playing Wii all of last night while blasting the freshly purchased reissue of Odelay, he might have known that.

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