Retailers have high hopes for consoles Retailers that have endured a prolonged slump in video gaming sales are banking that Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One will brighten a tough Christmas shopping season. It has been seven years since the last successful video game console releases, and retailers have suffered in the interim. From 2008 to 2012, annual sales in the US gaming market fell 38 per cent to $13.2bn, said Paul Raines, chief executive of GameStop, a US-based video games chain whose sales dropped in each of the past nine quarters. But Mr Raines is now expecting that to change, thanks to the new consoles. It's refreshing to get back to the growth business in the top line. We are pleased to have the last console cycle behind us. Retailers including Toys R Us, electronics chains Best Buy and Currys & PC World, as well as mass merchants Amazon, Walmart and Target, should also benefit from the change, analysts said. Consoles and software have been a wind in the face of these companies for several years and now they're switching into a tailwind. That is doubly powerful," said David Schick, analyst at Stifel Nicolaus. Sharon McCollam, Best Buy's chief financial officer, said this week the chain was optimistic that the new consoles would bring in more customers, but warned that they would generate only "low margins." Like the console makers, retailers face questions over whether the latest consoles will match the popularity of their predecessors as more consumers - both veteran gamers and novices - play games on smartphones and tablet computers. Mr Raines of GameStop, which has 6,650 stores in 15 countries including Germany, France, Italy and Australia, said there was "not a secular decline" in consoles. "It's been an absence of innovation in the console business," he said. We would say that social and mobile games are interesting. We participate in those markets. But the console business is far, far, far larger [in] scale and has much more activity and excitement in it," he said. Phil Samuels, category director for consumer electronics at Currys & PC World in the UK, said: "We believe the Xbox One and PS4 will revolutionise the market." He said shoppers had already put in more pre-orders for both than expected, but that "so far the Xbox is nudging into the lead." The Xbox One will be released this Friday. Sony said it sold a million PS4s on its first day last week. Retailers have overhyped the launch of new consoles before. Sales of Nintendo's Wii U, launched last year, were so poor that retailers now gloss over it and say the previous big console launch came in November 2006 with the PlayStation 3. "The consumer's ready for something new," said Laura Phillips, a Walmart senior vice-president in charge of entertainment. But given constraints on shipments of the new consoles, she added: "We do expect demand to outstrip supply." Under rules set by Sony and Microsoft, Walmart must sell the consoles at the same prices as everyone else: $399 for the PS4 and $499 for the Xbox. But the holiday discounts it will offer at 6pm on Thanksgiving next Thursday will include cut-price old consoles - a $199 PS3 and a $99 Xbox 360 - and Ms Phillips said she expected to sell more of them than the new devices. Mr Schick, the analyst, said the manufacturers appeared to have allocated the most consoles in the US to GameStop and Best Buy. "The [manufacturers] took a long hard look at the sales environment and said "do we only want our products to be online and in discount stores or do we want a vibrant marketplace that can showcase our product?,"" he said. GameStop will report results for the quarter to the end of October on Thursday. It said it expected to end its run of falling sales in the period - before the new consoles came out - thanks to new game releases including Grand Theft Auto 5. Toys R Us has blamed several quarters of falling sales on the weakness of the entertainment business, which includes video games. It has put the two new consoles on its Holiday Hot Toy List for 2013.