Game on

By Economist.com

The most successful video-games consoles

VIDEO games are big business. The industry is worth around $80 billion, and although games can be played on PCs and phones, the industry is still dominated by dedicated consoles. A good candidate for the earliest games console is the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, predating the home version of Atari's early blockbuster "Pong" by three years and selling 300,000 units—an impressive tally for something which could not even generate sound. With every "generation" of consoles (a somewhat abitrary system for grouping machines with similar release dates and roughly equivalent power) total sales rose steadily. The industry grew up when Sony released its PlayStation machine in 1994. Sony's great innovation was to market its machine not at children, but at men in their early 20s who had grown up with video games. Its successor, the PlayStation 2, remains the best-selling console ever produced. Today the industry is dominated by three companies: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. It has been seven years since any of those firms have released a new console. Now, though, three new machines are arriving more or less at once. Nintendo's Wii U was released in November 2012 and in February Sony unveiled details for its PlayStation 4. Microsoft is set to confirm the newest version of its Xbox console on May 21st. But they launch into a market in turmoil. Games designed for mobile phones, web browsers and tablets are growing fast, while sales of console games are lagging.