Social gaming, a la FarmVille and its brothers and sisters, are inseparable from such social networks as Facebook. Now the more traditional gaming sector is borrowing from this model. A social feature in Nintendo’s 3DS portable game system released earlier this year called StreetPass has become very popular, the Wall Street Journal writes. It allows gamers, if their machines come within 50 feet of each other, to automatically swap profile information or game data. This exchange occurs even when the device is closed and inside a bag. It has proven so popular that Electronic Arts plans to incorporate a similar feature into its upcoming "The Sims 3 Pets" for the 3DS.

There are other indications as well that console-based gamers are gravitating towards social-oriented - or at least more interactive - features: Microsoft has introduced voice search with Bing on Xbox, for example. Voice search works across media types and across apps. Just saying, for instance, “Xbox Bing Lego” or “Xbox Bing X-Men” pulls up all the available options for the movie, music, game and other matches around those titles.

There is also clearly demand for new consoles - depending on the manufacturer. Nearly a quarter of US gamers say they would buy a new console (successor to Wii) from Nintendo (27%) within six months of release, but a near-equal share say the same for new Sony (24%) and Microsoft (25%) consoles, according to data from The Nielsen Company (via MarketingCharts). These three consoles have substantially higher percentages of gamers willing to buy within six months of release than any other consoles included in the Nielsen survey.