"2000-2008 figures are sales of new physical content at retail exclusively"

Desktop gaming is not shrinking. It's rapidly shifting from physical retail to digital delivery, and it's very likely growing very rapidly. Most of that "other delivery formats" column is Steam, not mobile and browser games.

Of course, no-one outside Valve actually knows that, because they choose do not publish sales data, and they were estimated to have 70% of the digital delivery market in 2009, and probably much more of it now.

Well, this seems wrong on a couple of counts. For one thing, Steam has iOS and Android clients as of January of this year. For another, Steam was released a decade ago in 2002 - and if that's "1 decade too late," I'd like to see a prototype for a game distribution client that would work on the 1992 internet with 1992 hardware. (Seriously, that would be kind of neat. Very different, I suspect, but interesting nonetheless.)

> For one thing, Steam has iOS and Android clients[…]

Are you referring to the Steam Mobile app? (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/steam-mobile/id495369748?mt=8)

That's a pretty far cry from being a real client. Granted, I'm sure it's been hell trying to figure out how to play in Apple's garden - not to mention porting their engine to iOS/Android. But still, they've got a ways to go before I think we can call them a real player in the mobile gaming market.

EDIT:

> For another, Steam was released a decade ago in 2002 - and if that's "1 decade too late," […]

Good point. Steam was a huge game changer and still continues to impress me. But I think the parent was referring to being a decade too late in the sense that the industry is shifting to mobile (though I'm not sure I completely agree - not for the AAA titles on Steam, anyway).

These are fair points. To address the parent I was commenting on a bit better, I agree with your last point about the industry not necessarily shifting to mobile. There's not actually a lot of data here; the stuff I've seen (and the stuff parent cites) suggests that the shift started in 2008, at the beginning of a recession we're just now seeing the end of. Will the end of the recession mean that people start buying consoles and console games again? It might. I'm interested to see the 2012 numbers. My general sense, though, is that the 'hardcore gamer' industry is a different beast; it may be that the recession trimmed off a lot of casual gamers who bought a Wii a few years ago because it was the thing to do or something like that, but I have a very hard time imagining my own gamer friends wholly abandoning dedicated gaming hardware and immersive games that last forty and fifty hours at the least for even the most advanced iOS games - which as an iPhone and iPad owner I can say are better than I could have imagined, yet still not really the equal of console and computer games.

It's not because one industry is shrinking that it may disappear completely. You can still grow in share inside a shrinking industry and make lots of money out of it. Desktop PC gaming has been said to shrink continously, but obviously it is still there, and quite stable at this stage.

Mobile and browser games may be growing very, very fast, but that's a very fractioned world, based on micro-payments. That's not where you'll see most of the "AAA" titles in the near future anyway.

Overall, there are a lot of different needs to cater to, and people playing on browsers are probably very different from the ones playing on consoles, and so on. None of this segments is going to fade away any time soon.