The gaming industry is the richest business routinely dismissed by entire demographics as “childish”, “light-mindedn”, and “not serious”. These opinions are, in turn, routinely contradicted by the value of the global gaming industry: $165 billion in 2019 alone. Video games put food on the tables of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide – in 2017, the US alone had almost 2,500 game development companies with more than 65,000 employees directly involved in the development of games, with twice as many working on promoting and selling them, responding to the gamers’ support request, drawing models, writing music, recording dialogue, and designing covers and websites for them.
The global gaming industry is a major cash cow, generating billions in revenues for companies and independent developers around the world. Let’s take a look at the state of the gaming business at the end of 2019, and on a few insights on its future in the coming decade.
Mobile is big
In the last decade, mobile gaming was a true growth engine for the industry. In 2019, it generated almost half of the entire industry’s total revenues ($68.2 billion, according to Newzoo). And the popularity of mobile gaming is growing due to the ever-increasing size of the player base.
In 2008, one year after the release of the iPhone, smartphone sales grew to about 140 million units. In 2018, the number reached almost 560 million units – this means half a billion handsets sold in a single year. Statistics show that every smartphone owner installs a game on their handset within a week from its purchase, no matter if it’s Candy Crush or Fortnite, depending on their demographic. Seeing these numbers, it’s not a surprise that mobile is the most lucrative game platform today – and will continue to be in the coming years.
PC is still going strong
PC gaming seems not to go out of style anytime soon – and why should it? There are more than enough developers out there building exciting games for the platform, and as of last year, a gaming PC is still the platform that offers the (potentially) best-quality gaming to its user. While the growth of PC gaming has been slowing for years, it’s still growing: boxed and digital game sales have seen a 5.2% growth in 2019 compared to the previous year. Newzoo’s numbers show, in turn, that the time of browser games is slowly coming: browser games have seen a 15% decrease in revenues last year, with casual gaming transitioning to smartphones.
Competing consoles
Last year, the internet went nuts about a proposed new gaming console called Mad Box, announced by Slightly Mad Studios (the company behind Project CARS). As expected, the balloon deflated quickly, especially after Google announced Stadia – two investors instantly pulled out of the project, rendering it non-viable in the process. With no threat to their duopoly (plus Nintendo), Sony and Microsoft will continue to grow.
Last year, the two console gaming giants (plus Nintendo) racked up revenues of around $45 billion from their games alone, posting a growth of more than 7% compared to the previous year. And this was a year with no console launches, too. This year, in turn, we’ll have two: the PlayStation 5 is set to be released this February, followed by Microsoft’s new Xbox console around Christmas. Without a doubt, these will be coupled with exclusive game releases, too.
VR and cloud gaming
VR is expected to get a healthy boost this year thanks to Valve’s decision to release its next Half-Life title as a VR exclusive. The announcement of “Half-Life: Alyx” has already caused Valve’s Index headset to sell out ahead of Christmas, and we can expect to see even more gamers to be convinced by the game to choose it ahead of (and after) its release. Analysts expect this game to be a spark that will finally push major game developers to direct their attention to VR, and release some major exclusive titles on the platform.
Another exciting platform to keep an eye on in the new decade is cloud gaming. Google’s Stadia stirred the water – and the search giant has big plans for this platform, too. It promised at least 10 Stadia-exclusive titles for the first half of 2020 and purchased Typhoon Studios, a game development company based in Canada founded by former Ubisoft, EA, and WB Games employees, last December. This may be the spark needed to ignite the cloud gaming wildfire.
I think we can conclude that we have an interesting (and exciting) year – and decade – ahead of us.
