Hobby Game Sales up in 2009

According to this article in ICV2, sales for the hobby game store market were up from 5-10% for 2009. This was driven largely by a resurgence in Magic: The Gathering and board games, as well as the return of Heroclix. RPG sales, by contrast, were down 10%.

This means it's still a challenging market for most game companies. The retail store environment is still hanging in there, but there doesn't appear to be any reason to hope for a long-term resurgence of the retail stores. If anything, the trends seem to be pointing in the other direction. RPGs are down, and I'd suspect this is due in part to increasing acceptance of e-books and the growing availability of e-book readers. Card games and board games and miniatures still have a tactile value that makes them strong performers in retail stores, so until the electronic alternatives to those become interesting we'll expect those types of games to be good retail performers.

Not that this really helps the struggling game retailers; they could still use a solidly profitable game line that brings new customers into their stores. So could game publishers... any ideas?