Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past while, dear reader, you know about the teensy weensy market crisis that is currently giving the American economy a good, solid kick to the junk.  I could definitely go off on a tangent about my personal opinion of the bailout bill, the seemingly merry ignorance of massive personal debt, and the now rewarding of Wall Street for some insanely poor business practices.

However, I won’t.

What I will comment on is a news article I saw today detailing the falling prices of game company stock.  For those of you not interested in slogging through the entire article, let’s look at the highlights for the past month:

• Activision-Blizzard.  Down 28% from $16.62 to $11.95
• EA.  Down 37% from $44.21 to $27.80
• THQ.  Down 39% from $8.34 to $5.49
• Take 2.  Down 40% from $13.01 to $8.76

Things look even worse when you look at the year on year drops.  EA has a whopping 54% drop while THQ has plummeted 68% over the last year.  This are not cheery number for an industry that was declared to be recession proof.  Indeed, it shows just how bad the current market panic is. 

My personal view is, however, that the time will soon be right for snatching up some stocks for the old portfolio at basement prices.  I fully agree with analysts who believe that the game industry is relatively stable compared to other industry sectors at the moment, although I won’t go so far as to say that they are recession proof.

The big problem in predicting what game companies will do in the current market crisis is their relative age.  We haven’t seen what happens to a fully developed electronic game market in this kind of situation. Market problems of the 80s saw a very different landscape in the realm of video games. Nintendo was king of the hill having already saved the market from a self-created meltdown. Indeed, I think Nintendo will once again do very well in the face of adversity. Their new marketing direction as seen in the Wii and DS has broadened their appeal to an extremely wide market. The hardcore gamers might be made at darling Nintendo for abandoning them for the masses, but we were the ones that started the affair cycle upon jumping ship to the Playstation.

Console wars aside, I feel that the game market itself in terms of basic dollars and cents will come out of this mess very well. In the past, movies and other forms of affordable and basic entertainment have always done well in recessions. People need something to take their minds off of the crumbling foundations of society that are all around them. Why not pick up Madden and score a few virtual touchdowns?

Me?  Well, I’m off to the bank to buy some game stocks.

Saw this article on Reuters today:

Gina Sutton takes aim and deftly strikes down several targets in a row as they pop up on the screen in front of her.

A self-described girl gamer, she traveled from her home in Virginia to spend her 16th birthday at the Nintendo World Store in New York, and she can’t understand why anyone would think video games are just for boys.

“It’s like saying boys play with action figures and girls play with dolls,” she said as she used a Wii Zapper in a game called . “I’m the girl who plays with action figures.”

With her nimble fingers and bubbling enthusiasm, she is one of a fast-growing posse of female gamers in the United States and elsewhere capturing the attention of video game makers — expanding the market beyond male-appeal games like Grand Theft Auto.

Girls and young women are a “pot of gold” for the industry, said George VanHorn, senior analyst at market research firm IBISWorld. “The gaming industry has market characteristics that many would die for.”

According to IBISWorld, 38 percent of U.S. gamers are female, up from 33 percent in just five years.

From January through August of 2008 females ages 18 to 45 made up 28 percent of the total industry revenue, ranking second to males ages 18 to 45, who made up 37 percent.

Rooster Teeth — the geniuses behind the Halo-based series Red vs Blue — have been on this topic as well in recent days.

It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to the growing demographic of female players; there’s already a goodly number of games in publication, but if the market — especially in the States, but worldwide as well — continues its downturn, publishers and developers will be under additional pressure to produce titles that capture the interest of as many gamers as possible…which means we could, and perhaps should, expect to see more and better titles being released to capture the interest and attention of female gamers.

Of course, that means that developers might just have to step beyond games with titles like “Cooking Momma,” “Master Chef and Babyz,” and “Fashion Designer,” and move the content beyond ponies and makeup. Female gamers, in my experience, are a savvy lot who expect substantive content, and it’s odd to see that in many cases, developers and publishers have responded to the growing demographic of female gamers by publishing content that is the digital equivalent of the Barbie doll.