After a turbulent and revolutionary 
year, the video game industry is bracing itself for 2010’s holiday and total-year retail sales figures.
Buoyed by continued strong sales of titles like “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and Microsoft’s Kinect, many analysts expect December sales to show more positive momentum when the numbers are released after the market closes this afternoon.
[Reporting from Las Vegas’ CES, Gamasutra editor-at-large 
Chris Morris looks at video games’ presence at the major electronics show, examining how the show hints at the blossoming of a post-console future for games.]
For a trade show that’s not about video games, there sure are a lot of people talking about and playing them here at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.
OnLive, Kinect and Playstation are being discussed nearly as much as tablets, 3D TVs and cameras. It’s some of the clearest proof yet showing that as video games evolve and grow, the industry is moving closer and closer to the world of mainstream entertainment.
Streaming movies directly to Internet-enabled 
TV sets has already become familiar, but manufacturers are about to begin adding top-tier videogames to their bag of tricks — which could prove to be a fundamental shift in the vidgame industry.
OnLive, a cloud-based game streaming service that has been making headlines for the past few months, announced Tuesday that it has struck a deal with Vizio that would put the service on all 2011 model HD TVs and Blu-ray players as well as forthcoming smart phones and tablets from the company.
One of the problems with being a 
gamer during the holidays is you get a lot of duplicates of games you already own – or, worse, a collection of titles you never wanted in the first place. And not everyone is kind enough to include a gift receipt.
There’s money in those unwanted games, though – and there are a variety of ways to cash in on them.
Video game designers generally don’t look to their grandparents 
for inspiration when they’re putting together a game, but for Cara Ely, there really wasn’t a better choice.
As creative director at I-Play games and the overseer of the “Dream Day Wedding” series, Ely had long loved the story of how her grandparents met, had a whirlwind courtship and married – though she wasn’t sure if the larger gaming world would. But when she told the story to her development team, they loved it. The result was “Dream Day: True Love”.
Having picked the brains of Wall Street analysts on the best things to happen in the video game industry in 2010, there was no way we 
were going to let them go without talking about the worst as well.
This year, after all, might end in positive territory when all is said and done, but it’s going to be tough to look at it as a winner from several perspectives. Retail sales continue to spiral and developer-publisher relations took another blow to the chin. Meanwhile, stock prices of publicly traded game companies continued to lag.
Here’s what the analysts thought went wrong in 2010.
Take-Two didn’t just surpass analyst’s expectations 
for its fiscal fourth quarter yesterday; it crushed them. And in the process, it did something observers and investors have been hoping it could pull off for a decade: It turned an annual profit in a year with no new “Grand Theft Auto” in its catalog.
t’s a monumental achievement for a company that has been accused for years of being a one-trick pony. And it has investors wondering if the time has come to reconsider investing in Take-Two.
[Analyzing the weekend’s Spike TV Video Game Awards, 
Gamasutra editor-at-large Chris Morris reveals this year’s dwindling ratings for the show — despite “minimal signs of improvement” in quality and diversity.]
It wouldn’t be the holidays if the gaming world wasn’t in an uproar about U.S. cable channel Spike TV’s Video Game Awards. For the eighth consecutive year, the network has raised the ire of industry gadflys and gamers, who feel the show does more to set back video games than celebrate them.
Ratings for the VGAs are never spectacular. This year’s installment, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, attracted 627,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. That’s 20,000 fewer than last year and marks the fourth consecutive year of declines. Since 2007, ratings for the show have fallen 32 percent.
We certainly have no problem getting caught up in the fun of playing games, but the people who create them have their pocketbooks to worry about, too. In this column, finance expert and GameSpy contributor Chris Morris 
guides you through the tricky corridors the gaming industry’s financial side, touching on big-time business decisions and how they matter to the common gamer.
OnLive’s initial announcement of its self-titled, gaming-on-demand service prompted a lot of skepticism. With vaporware services like Phantom still fresh on the brain, gamers didn’t trust the company’s claims of immediate streaming and strong publisher support.
Even the inclusion of CEO Steve Perlman — who previously led development on the technology behind QuickTime and founded WebTV — didn’t do much to lower eyebrows about the project. Infinium Labs’ Phantom, you’ll recall, had Xbox co-founder Kevin Bachus running the show.
While gamers have been able to rent new titles by mail for years, the options have been limited when it came to streaming services.
That’s changing now, as OnLive looks to leverage cloud computing and a Netflix-proven business model to offer instant streaming of new hit titles to players. Last month, the company released a set-top box, letting customers buy recent and catalog releases on an a la carte basis; this week it released an iPad app; and starting in January, it will offer a pair of new payment options.
Chris Morris: Journalist 