In an article that I read, it said that recently more and more people (mainly American focused) are eating junk food because its cheaper than buying groceries and cooking it yourself.

But, when you take video games as an example, there are no cut backs.

However, that doesn’t mean we go trigger happy (pardon the pun) on giving our cash away. Yes, gamers are spending, but they are spending wisely. Because it’s no longer about just buying games and stacking them up – instead it’s about buying games that will have weeks worth of fun with.

In 2005, the top 20 titles accounted for 11% of games sold that year. In 2008, that rose to 18%. Similarly, compare 2008 Nintendo Wii’s game sales – where it’s top 10 titles account for 44% of the games sold for that console.

While this means that bigger companies like EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft Game Studios and so on will have a stable income, the smaller ones will eventually get bought out. Their games will be taken by the likes of EA, improved upon and then advertised in the market at a much higher spend than they could afford.

Case and example, Lionhead Studios (maker of Fable & Fable 2) got bought out by Microsoft in 2006. It’s an example of taking the first part of Fable, improving it – and then marketing it pretty well. May we will see bigger gaming companies swallow the smaller ones for creativity.

In the meantime, expect people to spend on games like Fallout 3, Fable 2, Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero and so on – because there is so much more to explore compared to buying Forza (I did 5 races and gave up!).

Twitter has been on the fastest growing companies in terms of its rapid rise in web hits. In fact, so rapid that it now ranks just above Digg, according to Hitwise.

But could this be temporary? Twitter got a lot of attention from the Hudson River plane crash – boosting not only it’s brand, but traffic as well. Further, it has got more attention from the recent Presidential Inauguration and I’m sure many such events where media will refer to Twitter’s user status.

So with all this traffic – it’s no wonder that Twitter displaces Digg. However, does that mean that Twitter makes more cash? Well, not really.

Digg has ads and they earn revenue from that, however Twitter on the other hand isn’t ad-supported but instead plans to have premium services. Like a premium account, or paying for a valid verification as a celebrity or corporate member. Hence, Twitter will not be dependent on traffic count, but instead measure itself by growth of user registration.

Now, if you look at the graph below issued by Hitwise on a comparison between Digg and Twitter – you see that there is an increasing volume to the point that Twitter has caught up.

However, I figure that the traffic for Twitter mostly represents new users. This is on my assumption that most existing users use third party apps or mobiles to update their twitter status. Hence, that being so, we see a potential growth of Twitter’s user base. Therefore, I assume that the user-sign up graph would be in a very similar pattern to it’s increasing web traffic.

Question is – how many of those will pay for a premium account? I can’t see Twitter putting ads anytime soon – and if so, revenue from that could be minimal if most users are using various other ad-free means to update their status.

Fable 2 creator, Lionheart studios has launched a new premium expansion as of the 13th January.

I am yet to download Fable 2 – Knothole Island Expansion, however, for those who are looking to get back their lost dog, you can now do so.

Thanks to Leroy who made a comment on the previous post, you can now get back your lost dog by sacrificing a human being in the little graveyard of this new expansion!