INTRODUCTION
The games industry, as it stands today, largely consists of two major sectors: the video games market and the computer games market. Until the early 90's, both markets evolved in much the same way, following a boom/bust cycle dictated by the shelf lives of the individual games hardware standards of the time. Since then, the games market, overall, has begun to stabilise, partly the result of the ever-present but constantly evolving computer games market which is dominated by a single hardware standard, the PC. The video games market, on the other hand, has always been dominated by proprietary standards, such as Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox 360. The closed nature of these video game standards, coupled with the reluctance of the standard owners to release major hardware upgrades (to prevent obsolescence) has and will continue, for the foreseeable future, to result in their limited shelf lives and the continued cyclicality of the market.
Indeed the maturing of the market over the last decade has resulted in a more uniform pattern of growth emerging, based around 6 year market cycles. A pattern of 4 years of growth followed by a 2 year transition period has become something of a standard within the industry. The industry has now started its latest cycle following the release of the Xbox 360 in late 2005 and Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 a year later.
