The day gamers have been dreading for months has arrived. As reported by GamingFront.net, the games industry, once thought to be recession proof, took a major hit on Wall Street yesterday with stocks from several companies slipping in value.

The biggest companies in the slide include Vivendi (-15.68 overnight), Gamestop Corp (-8.06), Sony Corp (-4.34), Ubisoft Entertainment (-2.85), and Walt Disney (-3.26).

Gamestop’s slide can be attributed to retail powerhouses Amazon.com and Best Buy recently announcing their entry into the used game market. While Gamestop didn’t have a monopoly on the used game trade, they were without question the largest player. The addition of giants like Amazon.com is sure to impact business.

For the other companies, no real single reason can be found, other than their immunization to the global recession has expired. Vivendi is perhaps the most perplexing, since the company was previously thought to have a strong and market-safe lineup.

"We are resilient, but at one point in time I think we are going to be caught, mostly by unemployment,” Vivendi SA CEO Jean-Bernard Levy said in a Bloomberg interview. "My biggest fear, for my business, is unemployment rates are going up."

Sad news for the companies and stockholders, sure, but perhaps you are unconcerned? Perhaps you think that this slide won’t mean much to you, an average gamer? Think again.

Platform Nation postulates that in the short term, the loss of investment money could lead to layoffs at development houses, with which we have to agree. This means smaller staffs leading to longer development times. The games you’re looking forward to could either be delayed, or worse, released before they’re tuned and glitch-free.

In the long term, companies will want to appear as stable as they can to attract investors. To do that, they’ll release games and announce projects which investors see as guaranteed revenue. We all know what that means: sequels. If you’re sick of World War 2 shooters and sports games now, just wait until the industry becomes even more risk averse than it already is.

Speculation aside, the one thing we can take away with certainty today is that the games industry is no longer immune to the global recession. With any luck, the resilience of the industry will minimize the damage in the weeks to come.