Gaming Revenue

[Juxtapose]

I stumbled across this the other day and thought you'd all find it interesting. It's from a first party article in which Microsoft discusses it's pending aquisition of Activision-Blizzard. The key thing I want to link to is a 2 page .pdf of which the first page is a graph showing gaming revenue over the years based on platform (i.e. PC, Arcade, Console, Mobile, etc.), and the second page shows the total number of gamers, internet users, and people on the planet as well as the total addressable market for gaming compared to other medium.

Link here.

Assuming this is all accurate, that's very interesting. I knew mobile gaming has grown greatly over the last half decade, but I had no idea that it was this much. That absolutely explains company's in general shifting more to mobile options and mobile style options. Also surprised to see consoles performing below PC profits, I truly thought the console market was larger. Looking at this graph, it seems Microsoft, with Game Pass, mobile options, and their Xbox brand spread across so many platforms, has a good future-market-proof strategy to keep going. I'm glad Sony has begun porting their first party titles to PC as well, as it doesn't look like console-only is future viable anymore.

For the 2nd page, I never released there were that many gamers worldwide, and I'm surprised to see games above paid TV in terms of total market potential.

 

[theotherguy]

I knew mobile gaming has grown greatly over the last half decade, but I had no idea that it was this much.

Yeah, that's crazy, but understandable given the number of phones there are in the world. What I do wonder is how inflated it is due to all the micro transactions in almost every mobile game (see

).

Also surprised to see consoles performing below PC profits, I truly thought the console market was large

That one is a real surprise to me. There's a lot of PC's out there, but i never thought the number that were into gaming was all that large, esp. not compared to the console space.

Definitely seems MS is on the right track pushing gaming through mobile and cloud. I'm not a fan, but clearly there's a huge market out there.

 

[Marlow]

Kind of makes sense with regards to mobile, and how one chooses to define game/gamer. Think of all the card games, casino games, games like chess which have been super popular for a long time, crosswords, sudoku puzzles, other misc puzzles. Now people have the technology and means to be able to play those games mobile. Not to mention all the games like temple run, fruit ninja, candy crush, and those puzzle games that get advertised on social media non-stop.


I think there's also a phycological aspect, where people are fine paying a couple bucks for an app, and then doing $100 worth of micro transactions instead of paying a flat $60 for a game.

 

[Juxtapose]

That one is a real surprise to me.

Yeah. Also consider that, while high end PC hardware is expensive, the games themselves are often very cheap, especially when third party sites (i.e. Greenman Gaming) and key reseller sites (i.e. G2A) are involved.

Back during the 7th generation there was a push from publishers to support consoles over PC because of the piracy concerns, and that continued into the 8th gen.

The industry as a whole is very different now.

I think there's also a phycological aspect, where people are fine paying a couple bucks for an app, and then doing $100 worth of micro transactions instead of paying a flat $60 for a game.

Absolutely. I dabbled in The Elder Scrolls Blade and Mortal Kombat Mobile for a while, but never paid a cent. I do intend to try Diablo Immortal at some point, but also plan to spend absolutely squat.