Global video game sales are likely to grow 15.2 percent this year to $48.3 billion this year, followed by a 9.3 percent rise to $52.8 billion in 2009, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates.
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The industry is also benefiting from a new group of casual, or light, gamers, as Nintendo has broadened the gaming population beyond the traditional user base of young males with its intuitive, easy-to-use games such as "Wii Sports."
"The Wii . has opened up an entirely new set of gamers that weren't there before," Electronic Arts Games Label President Frank Gibeau said.
"If you look at the DS and the Wii they are just adding people to the pie," he said.
Underscoring Nintendo's smash success, operating profit at the creator of such iconic game characters as Mario and Zelda more than doubled in the year ended March 31.
Slowdown in the global economy and its chilling effect on personal consumption, which cast a long shadow over other industrial sectors, have not become a major source of concern for game industry executives, at least not yet.
Microsoft said it is not seeing any weakness in its Xbox business from the soft U.S. economy and expects the company and the rest of the video game industry to weather downturns in consumer spending.
Video games offer many more hours of entertainment than a two-hour movie, Don Mattrick, a senior vice president at Microsoft's entertainment and device division, told Reuters this week.
"Consumer spending is still going to exist, and people are going to prioritize," Mattrick said. "I'm bullish about our growth prospects as an industry and as Microsoft."
Konami's Kitaue expects the video game industry to see the best year in the current console cycle next year before a possible slowdown in the year after, followed by a shift of gamers' attention to upcoming consoles - the generation still in development.
