Mr. Gallagher started by trying to educate the audience of lawyers by dispelling the many myths about gamers. Mr. Gallagher provided the following statistics to prove his point.

1. The average gamer is 33 years old and has about 13 years of gaming experience.

2. The core demographic is 18 to 35 years old.

3. Adult women account for 31% of the gamer population.

4. By contrast, boys under the age of 18 only account for 20% of gamers.

5. Males account for 62% of gamers whereas females are 38%.

The most surprising statistic that Mr. Gallagher shared was the direct relationship between the number of hours a gamer plays videogames and the number of hours the gamer engages in other past-times such as exercise, sports, volunteer work, reading, religion, etc. The ESA's research revealed that gamers who spend 6.8 hours per week playing videogames spent 23.4 hours each week on these other activities. Whereas gamers who spend 11 hours or more each week playing videogames spend a whopping 34.5 hours per week participating in these other activities. So much for the lazy, anti-social gamer stereotype.

Mr. Gallagher's next topic was money, and the ESA president painted a very rosey picture of the industry. According to the NPD Group, videogame sales saw a 43% year over increase from 2006 to 2007. In the United States alone, software and hardware sales exceeded $10 billion. The industry is booming. Between 2003 and 2006 the US videogame industry grew by 17% whereas the growth of the entire US economy for the same period was only 4%.

All that growth has created a total of 80,000 jobs both directly and indirectly related to the industry. The average salary for these 80,000 jobs? A surprising $92,368.

Looking globally now, in 2006 the global videogame market was $31.6 billion and is expected to grow to nearly $50 billion by 2011. Asia Pacific is expected to lead the market in 2011 with a $19 billion share followed by Europe/Middle East/Africa at $15 billion and then the U.S. at $12 billion. Severely lagging behind will be Latin America at only $1 billion.

Surprisingly, Mr. Gallagher dismissed China as an emerging videogame market. In fact, Mr. Gallagher emphatically stated, "There is no viable market for games in China." Mr. Gallagher provided two reasons for his strong statement, which stands in contrast with Michael Pachter's prediction. First, it is apparently illegal to own or sell a videogame console in China. Second, Chinese law requires publishers to submit their games for review by the Minister of Culture prior to sale. This review process purportedly takes 9 to 12 months, but by that point, the market has already been flooded with pirated copies of the game. As a consequence to these legal and bureaucratic retraints, there is no videogame market in China.

Finally, Mr. Gallagher discussed piracy. Piracy, of course, is a hot button issue for the industry as it costs publishers $3 billion a year in losses. To summarize Mr. Gallagher's statements, the industry is not going to sit idly by while $3 billion a year drops out the proverbial hole in the industry's pocket. Hence the mod chip crackdown that occurred earlier this year. Leaving no doubt, all the mod chips currently on the market are illegal as they allow the user to bypass the console's DVD encryption technology, which is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

But if you want to discourage the use of modchips to enable consoles to play pirated games, why don't the console manufacturers simply make all their consoles region free. Say what? The logic is that many modchip consumers mod their systems to play import games, only to discover the unintended "benefit" of playing pirated games. Remove the necessity of modding a system to play import games, and you'll reduce the modchip market without expensive FBI raids, etc. Elder Taragan raised this issue with Mr. Gallagher. His response? To paraphrase, it's up to the console manufacturer's, you need to talk to them about it. But isn't that his job as the leader of the industry? It would be nice for Mr. Gallagher to show some leadership on this issue and create a new region-free standard for all videogame consoles.