Exactly the same as the film industry, bang on about piracy but these figures are excellent...and no it would be 100Billion if piracy was stopped.

Ok there have been some good releases and its credit to the developers lets hope it can continue.

Do you think Piracy will be more of an issue as the credit crunch and the increased hardship of living costs kick in?

As Stuart Campbell said:

"Piracy has 'supposedly' been killing the industry for the last 30 years and yet sales revenues continue to go up and up"

The industry could possibly be even healthier without the pirates but it's hardly the doom and gloom canvas the industry like to paint.

We all talk as if we are in the middle of the credit crunch right now and it wont get any worse. Call me Mr Doom & Gloom but the fact is that the impact of the CC is yet to reach alot of people. Lets take a look at what Xmas sales are like this year, or even like for likes sales this time next year.
Believe me - I hope I am wrong, but we should stop thinking that if the credit crunch hasn't affected sales and consumer confidence yet, then it definately wont in the future.

2 issues here;

Piracy; in the gameing market the key sector that suffer highly through piracy is PC(/MAC if your being fussy) due to the eaiser nature to a). reproduce and mass produce fakes in the material market and b). the ease of "sticking it on the net" (gamershell springs to mind, as to cracks, cd keys, etc...)
Thats not to say consols arn't affected, the just suffer much less on the internet front, and on the material front, it is harder to produce fakes (harder nort impossible) due to coding diffrences etc...

That being said, many sources will say piracy is worse for consols, this is due to, although harder to produce, their is a bigger market for pirate consols games, as mot PC pirate versions are free (eg no market for it)

Now for the credit crunch, this is a USA article so yes their is more of an issue. But the main force behind the continuation of the credit crunch is (as usual) speculation.
People will now (of course) flame me with figures of how this and that have fallen. Those falls are quite often caused by speculation; negative speculation causes reduced bussiness and consumer confidence, thus leading to less investment and large scale schemes from bussiness and less "risky" purchases from consumers (ie, high cost; holidays, cars, housing [the latter is a primarily an issue in the UK due to higher houseing costs and a higher % of house ownership])

BUT thankfully for us gamers, game investment, while relativly high, and considered risky (ie, not revenue return until the END of the development stage [as you can't sell it before it's finished (ignoring pre-ordering...)]). Will continue as this "risk" is considered a "stable" risk, as it is allways present and the game market is currently considered relatively unresponsive to people financial stability. It is also a continued purchase dependant good; meaning once you have your consol or rig (PC), for continued use, you need continued purchase (new games) to maximse pleasure. Basically (i'm now bored of writing) the game industry will do fine during our current market issue, which is primarily caused by people being overeactive to what some big mouth hawker is "claiming" and as such causes it to happen (in a similar affect to insider trading)

sorry for the length
Fraser.