Anita Frazier, video game analyst for NPD Group, said console games, which sell for $60 apiece, are perceived as a good value because they afford hours of play.
"At-home forms of entertainment tend to succeed in difficult times because people are 'nesting' more at home," Frazier said.
The Los Angeles economy, which employs more than 225,000 in entertainment, could feel some pain. Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast, said a recession could hamper the ability of studios to finance films, TV networks to sell ad time and companies to cash in on the sale of T-shirts and other merchandise.
"The entertainment industry is going to be somewhat insulated because of the long lead times for producing films and because movies remain an inexpensive form of entertainment," Nickelsburg said. "It's cheaper than the theater, ballgames or white-water rafting."
All bets are off, though, if the recession leads to widespread layoffs.
Nikki Maxwell, a 39-year-old mother of three from North Hills, said her family was still suffering the aftermath of the writers strike.
Her husband, a video game writer, was displaced by striking writers who flooded the market. He subsequently landed a job with a start-up, but the couple fear the new company might falter. Maxwell lost her grant-writing job to state budget cuts.
They cut discretionary spending. They stopped buying CDs, DVDs, video games and books and gave up Netflix. They canceled HBO and Showtime, along with trips to indoor playgrounds and the movies.
"We lost the certainty we had," Maxwell said. "My husband says the biggest loss that he has is the sense that we can do anything. We had no doubt that we could be successful. Here we are -- we're statistics."
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dawn.chmielewski@latimes.com
meg.james@latimes.com
