Page:Gametronics Proceedings.djvu/168

 XV.TRENDS IN TV GAMES

JERRY EIMBINDER

Electronic Engineering Times

Great Neck, New York Projections for video game sales vary widely. Depending on who is doing the forecasting, TV game sales range from under $400 million to more than $1 billion by 1980. Some researchers project video game sales reaching a peak in early 1979 and then declining because of inroads by home computers.

Projecting marketplace sizes is a tricky business. In the early 1960s, for a time it was believed that the tunnel diode would become the workhorse of the semiconductor industry and would displace transistors in circuit applications ranging from radio receivers to military systems. The tunnel diode, however, never reached the performance capability anticipated for it and, although it is still used today, is advantageous only for a handful of applications.

Several factors will have significant bearing on the size of the TV game marketplace during the next five years. First, of course, will be the extent of the impact of the home computer. Prices for home computers, in 1978, only a year ago, were projected to range from $1200 to $1500. But in February, 1977, Commodore announced that its home computer PET would become available in July at a price of approximately $450. At the same time. National Semiconductor revealed that it was testing a prototype home computer, available possibly as early as June, 1977 with an anticipated price of $300.

Because playing games will be one of the functions provided by home computers, many students of the games industry feel that the TV game as an independent system may be short lived.

There are opposing viewpoints. Just as many households today have two or three television sets, it is argued that the coexistence of a home computer with one or more TV game systems makes just as much sense.

Of course, in the history of the electronics industry, many advancements have resulted in the superceding of earlier developments. On the other hand, despite the purchase of $4.2 billion worth of television receivers in the U. S. in 1976, consumers also bought more than $800,000 worth of radios. From a standpoint of units sold, the number of radios purchased during 1976 is roughly equal to the number of TV sets purchased.

The public, in fact, also purchased $2.5 billion worth of audio equipment and spent approximately $2.8 billion for other consumer electronics equipment. Anyone that might have been worried, a few years ago, about the impact of color television on the rest of the consumer electronics