A senior Intel executive has claimed that games consoles will be relegated to the dustbin of history. And his claim is backed up by the latest Datamonitor research on the market which shows it will decrease from $3.5 billion in 1997 to $2.9 billion in 2002. Tim Keating, content group director at Intel Europe, told trade magazine Computer Trade Weekly that consoles were "dead in the water" because of the increase in online gaming and the takeup of PCs by home users. The Datamonitor figures show that while the market value of console software in Europe at $1.9 billion outstripped the hardware market at $1.6 billion. But Datamonitor does not see consoles terminating and thinks that innovation will still make the market lucrative. ®