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GameSpot’s Year in Review

Here’s a great review of the Best of 2007:

A new year is a good time to try new things, and 2007 started with a wave of high-profile departures throughout the industry. New Year’s Eve revelers barely had time to recover from the festivities before Microsoft confirmed that Tim and Chris Stamper, cofounders of Perfect Dark and Viva Pia00740061 developer Rare, were no longer with the company. The next day, news arrived that Human Head CEO Tim Gerritsen, project manager for Rune and producer for Prey, was leaving the company to pursue something new in the games industry (which wound up being Big Rooster

By mid-January, Take-Two Interactive acknowledged that Rockstar Games cofounder and managing director Terry Donovan had left the company, and longtime GameSpot editor-in-chief Greg Kasavin went to Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles studio, where he worked on the rejuvenated Command & Conquer series.

January is also a big month for number crunchers because retail sales figures for the single biggest month of the year roll in and the NPD Group posts its annual industry recap. The group reported that 2006 was another record-breaking year for the US retail gaming industry, with sales growth practically across the board. The full-year take was $12.5 billion, and more than a quarter of that amount came in December alone.

Two of the big reasons for those record-breaking sales were the November 2006 launches of the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii. It didn’t take long for 2007 to establish a trend in the consoles’ fates that would last the entire year. Indication that the supply-constrained PlayStation 3 might be off to a slow start arrived in early January when GameStop announced that it had significant quantities of the system still in stock, followed by reports that Japanese retailers were discounting the machine in response to sluggish sales…(more)