Consumer Spending on Games to Maintain or Increase

65 percent of consumers will spend equal or more amount of money on games.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23220

This means that for all the down-sizing that is happening in the games industry, the market and the money is still pretty much there.

The main reasons for all the down-sizing then just has to be the following:

• Drying up of project financing.
• Business people not as bullish as before, and adopting a more conservative stance.
• And of course many are simply making use of the opportunity to do what they could not do in good times (i.e. the kind of layoffs and shutdowns that has happened). Kind of sneaky but we all know that happens.
• Also some studios / publishers are genuinely in trouble.