Produced collaboratively by learning provider REDTRAY and benchmarking organisation Towards Maturity, the new study collates the thoughts, opinions, and intentions of over 180 learning and development professionals across the UK. When asked about the live online learning systems they either use or plan to use to deliver business training, less than nine percent of the L&D leaders taking part in the study said that virtual worlds, immersive, or avatar-driven training resources were likely to be part of their company's learning mix anytime soon.

The most-mentioned areas for growth over the next eighteen months were

• virtual classrooms, where nearly sixty percent of learning professionals have planned for new investment or further development;
• virtual meetings, which 47% expect to use more, or introduce, in the coming months; and
• virtual conferencing, which 43% say they will take-up or develop further uses for across the business.

Vicky Jones, Managing Director at REDTRAY says, "Serious games have received a lot of media coverage in recent years. But despite the hype, the study seems to indicate that organisations are either not ready to embrace serious games as a way of delivering training, or it might be that the economic climate is dictating a need to prioritise their spending. Perhaps other technologies such as virtual meetings or virtual classrooms represent a smaller, more manageable step into the virtual space both for organisations and their learners."

Issued as part of the build up to October's Harnessing Live Online Learning activities, the alarming statistic for the serious games industry is just one of dozens of new facts, figures, statistics, and insights scheduled for public release next month when the new study is published.