Game industry suffers decline

NPD's retail sales survey for September shows gaming sales have fallen back 7% year on year to $1.27 billion. This is the first decline since March 2006, reports Seeking Alpha.

NPD analyst Anita Frazier says: “The health of the video games industry remains quite strong despite the rocky economic conditions. Tracking against typical seasonality, the US video games industry is positioned to realise $22 billion or more in revenue for the year.”

Nintendo topped the hardware sales rankings for the month of September, with the Wii and the DS selling a combined 1.2 million units.

AMD has released an HD-ready graphics card with long-lasting performance options and a price tag under $150, says IGN.

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card is AMD's latest entry in the desktop PC graphics market, meant to act as an affordable option in the Radeon HD 4800 series.

The Radeon HD 4830 combines HD multimedia capabilities, as well as support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games that will be made available for the upcoming holiday season.

Amazon has acquired Reflexive Entertainment, an online gaming Web site that sells digital rights management-free game downloads for PCs and Macs, says Seattle Tech Support.

Reflexive Entertainment CEO Lars Brubaker says: "It means we'll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon's distribution channel and with Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play."

Reflexive distributes 1 100 PC games, almost 200 Mac games and 133 free online Web games.