I’ve never been what folks in the industry call a gamer. I’m dating myself a bit, but the only two gaming systems I’ve ever owned were the Atari 2600 (in middle school) and a Sega Genesis (right after college). I’ve certainly been tempted to pick up one of the new systems whenever the newest, latest and greatest comes out. But alas, I’m too busy living my real life to get sucked into a virtual existence and spend too much time in front of the TV. Don’t get me wrong– I’m certainly not averse to gamers and gaming, but I just have too much else going on to devote any energy to something that in the greater scheme of things seems so trivial.

The industry however, from a business perspective at least, fascinates me. I did a little research today while searching for potential niche markets to get involved in and came across the Sony PlayStation 2 community. Arguably, this is the most popular gaming system ever introduced. A search for PS2 Games on eBay (where niche markets are prevalent) returned over 12,000 items for sale. Google returned 12 million pages, and I discovered that search term gets searched for over 100,000 times a month. This was kind of amazing to me. Consider this is more searches than either the PS3 or the Nintendo wii which is supposedly the latest and greatest. And this is for a system that is, what, six years old now? That’s ancient in the world of technology. Anyway, I finished my research and put together a quick affiliate site for PlayStation 2 Games. Maybe I’ll post some stats here about how it does. It looks like the answer to my initial question, is the video gaming industry dying, is going to be a solid “no.” At least for now anyway.