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Over the past few days I have seen some articles written in not only the gaming press, but in the normal media as well about the current NPD numbers of the industry.

Gaming Faces Its Archenemy: Financial Reality is head line for the New York Times article, I recently read through. The article goes into depth in how much sales have dropped over the course of the year and then begins to make comparisons to the famous crash of the game industry in the 80’s.

The article paints the industry to be in dire straits and on the verge of another crash; however the truth could never be farther. These numbers, as stated in the article, are purely based on retail only sales.

Game Informer just released a similar article about NPD numbers, stating the same facts the physical sales were on the decline by 20%, however they did acknowledge that if digital sales had been added, the resulting NPD numbers would have shown that game sales are on the rise.

I attended MIGS, the Montreal International Game Summit, which is a miniature version of GDC about 2 years ago when a representative of Valve gave a keynote. During his presentation he reveled the sales data for just Team Fortress 2 (TF2). The graph was unbelievable… When Super Meat Boy was released on Steam, the Super Meat team said that the game sold four times as well as it did on Xbox Live (XBLA)

I for one cannot remember the last time I bought a physical copy of a game, nor do any of my friends. With the advent of Steam and other digital distribution platforms who needs physical media anymore?

The thing is other industries have trouble accepting this fact.

As a rule of thumb, every three years is a major technology shift. The Game Industry is one of the leaders in creating new technology, so naturally it adapts to the new practices developed. Others like Film, Television, Newspaper and Print, have a lag time in adjusting to these technology changes and are suffering for it.

At the end of the day, the Game Industry is here to stay and it’s not going anywhere.