Like the movie business, the games business is limited by the bandwidth-constraint online, but it has more flexibility to get around the problem.
Believing in the sport of college football anymore is rather like believing in Santa Claus, given what a big-time business the games have become.
The decision to reorganize was 100 percent made by us, with no pressure from EA. EA has a diverse business with games on consoles, PCs and practically every other platform under the sun.
In the used games business, that peak period actually occurs after January 1st, when many games and consoles have been turned in and people are looking for something new.
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That makes the games business far more predictable, and accounts for its far higher returns.
Over the past decade, a lot of retailers have entered and exited the used games business.
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Commercialisation and project management support will also be provided from Abertay's business and computer games experts.
Yair Landau, president of Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, explains that the games business is polarised.
With the profits we made from the Shanghai Expo, we decided to switch our business to online games.
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The group highlighted an "exceptional year" from its Activision Blizzard video games business.
Vivendi, Europe's biggest telecom and entertainment group, has reported profits boosted by its games business and strong demand from Brazil.
That spells bad news for retail game stores like Game Spot, although they will continue to do a brisk business in used games.
Business-simulation games are available for everyone from managers to call-centre workers and have been used by companies from Coca-Cola to Shell.
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Earnings at Vivendi's games business Activision Blizzard grew 38.6% and the unit has raised its earnings outlook thanks to strong product launches.
The games business has been called a hits-driven one, because players flock to whatever game is new and popular at the time.
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Lots of people are wandering around, looking for something to do, and they are knocking on the door of the games business.
The games business is cyclical: every five or six years, a new generation of consoles appears to slug it out in the market.
We also visited David Braben, the man who created the legendary game Elite in the 1980s and went on to run a successful games business.
"The celebrity experience of the Olympics is relatively short-lived, " says Dean Baim, economics and finance professor at Pepperdine University who has closely studied the business of the Games.
Slumping sales in the traditional games business are no secret.
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As a bright spot in the struggling conglomerate, the games business is also the prime example of how Sony plans to deliver content to its devices using its online network.
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This year the company signed deals with LG and Samsung to power separate cloud gaming services that will allow these companies to enter the console games business without needing to build a console.
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Nokia's N-gage mobile games business also suffered setbacks.
Expanded Universes are big business for video games.
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"We thought we could replicate" the same games business model on mobile as online, said Doug Purdy, a Facebook director of product management, before discovering that developers were building stand-alone apps, tailored to the Android and Apple operating systems.
The games business is a business.
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Can you learn to improve your thought processes and business agility through video games?
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The crowdfunding site which has just arrived in the UK promises an interesting new business model for the games industry.
"RIM today is not really on our radar, " says Andrew Stein, director of mobile business development for PopCap Games Inc.
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