As you sink into the couch and pick up your Xbox consol this weekend, consider these video gaming trends.
- The global video-game market was worth around $56 billion in 2010. That is more than twice the size of the recorded music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry.
- It is estimated that video games will be the fastest growing form of media over the next few years, with sales rising to $82 billion by 2015.
- The video-game industry is explosive! For example, in November 2010 “Call of Duty: Black Ops” was released and worldwide sales of the game topped $650 million in the first five days. A month later the total stood at over $1 billion.
- According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), 72% of households in America play games of some sort. The average age of players in America, the industry’s biggest market, is 37 years of age and the ESA notes that 42% of gamers are female.
- American consumers are expected to spend $14.1 billion on games, mostly on the consol variety written for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3 or Nintendo’s Wii.
- China is the second biggest market and one of the fastest growing, with sales rising 20% last year. The Chinese are accelerating the development of online games, to be played on PCs, which are easier to protect from pirates.
- The biggest change in the industry in the last year has been the rise of the mobile phone as a gaming device. Games specifically designed to be played on mobile phones already account for $8 billion of the $56 billion global games market, even though they typically sell at less than a tenth the price of a traditional consol game.
- Many games for mobile phones are made by small start-ups, attracted by low entry costs. The best known example is “Angry Birds”, released in 2009 by a small Finnish firm with just 55 employees. It is the most popular games ever made, with total downloads of more than 500 million.
- With the spread of high-speed Internet connections, the web has emerged as a games platform. A good example if “World of Warcraft”, which is an intricate online fantasy world filled with orcs and dragons, and attracts around 9 million regular users. Each user pays a monthly subscription fee of around $10 to play.
- The most popular Facebook games command enormous audiences. “CityVille”, an urban planning game, attracts 51 million users a month. Zynga, the game’s developer, established in 2007 and now has 2,000 employees and revenues of around $850 million a year.
These facts were taken from articles in a special report issue of The Economist. You can find the full articles in “All the world’s a game.”
