Halo Reach – exactly what retail needed

Of course we’ve been here before. Red Dead Redemption, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction. Brief moments of success in 2010 followed by weeks of decline.

But this time it’s different, right? Yes, is the answer. For a start games are actually coming out that can continue the momentum started by Halo. There’s Guitar Hero today, next week there’s FIFA, the week after PES, the week after that Medal of Honor and Just Dance 2.

No one is sure retail can make quite as much as it managed in 2009 – even Chart-Track’s expert mathematics plot a year-on-year decline of almost 10 per cent – but there’s every reason to believe we can come close. And with Call of Duty and Kinect coming out within days of each other this November,anything is possible.