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Worldwide Gaming Market Hits $91 Billion In 2016, Says Report (venturebeat.com)
According to a new SuperData Research report, the worldwide gaming market was worth a whopping $91 billion this year, with mobile gaming leading the way with a total estimated market value of $41 billion. The PC gaming market did very well too, as it pulled in nearly $36 billion over the year. PC Gamer reports: The mobile game segment was the largest at $41 billion (up 18 percent), followed by $26 billion for retail games and $19 billion for free-to-play online games. New categories such as virtual reality, esports, and gaming video content were small in size, but they are growing fast and holding promise for 2017, SuperData said. Mobile gaming was driven by blockbuster hits like Pokemon Go and Clash Royale. The mobile games market has started to mature and now more closely resembles traditional games publishing, requiring ever higher production values and marketing spend. Monster Strike was the No. 1 mobile game, with $1.3 billion in revenue. VR grew to $2.7 billion in 2016. Gaming video reached $4.4 billion, up 34 percent. Consumers increasingly download games directly to their consoles, spending $6.6 billion on digital downloads in 2016. PC gaming continues to do well, earning $34 billion (up 6.7 percent) and driven largely by free-to-play online titles and downloadable games. Incumbents like League of Legends together with newcomers like Overwatch are driving the growth in PC games. PC gamers also saw a big improvement with the release of a new generation of graphics cards, offering a 40 percent increase in graphics power and a 20 percent reduction of power consumption.
At the same time AAA-games are becoming more like movies with less interaction and more passive watching of cutscenes, and this will continue until there is no distinguishing element between film and game left.
Not important to you.
Games allow people to vent their emotions, instead of using violence.
It can help develop skills and foster creativity.
Game development pushes technology further.
People waste their money on all sorts of things:
- Fashion
- Alcohol
The biggest waste is government. They are parasites on society.
The biggest drivers of economy and innovation are happiness and freedom.
Government is the worst enemy of both those.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Time I choose to waste, isn't wasted time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Can we please all try to bury the myth once and for all that gaming is niche or a childs hobby. Jokes about people in basements aside, isn't it time gaming was recognised as a legitimate hobby?
Gaming is for computing what porn is for video: The driving force for development.
Face it, what "sensible" application needs stronger and stronger CPUs and GPUs? Cryptography, yes. Visual design, ok. And now something that could actually drive such development because there is a mass market for it. Well? What office PC needs a CPU/GPU that can do a fantastic amount of calculations per second?
You might have no use for gaming, that's ok. I do. I am in the area of cryptography research, and believe me, I love those faster and faster GPUs that make more and more statistical attacks feasible. Yes, those people wasting their time shooting flashy pixels in their spare time help drive my field.
And I want to thank you for that. If you didn't buy graphics cards that cost 500+ bucks, they would cost about 10,000 bucks, if they were available at all, and I could probably not do what I'm doing today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That is $91 billion in money that could have been spent on more useful things, and billions of hours of lost productivity. This is an incredibly disappointing statistic, to know just how much money and time we waste on things that just aren't important.
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
Is it considered "download", "PC", "retail", ...? How would the researchers even know, considering that Valve is not (to the best of my knowledge) publishing data on its sales?
The money was just used to perform a transaction.
They wasn't wasted.
You're free to argue the wrong product has been produced though but obviously those paying the $91 billion didn't think so.
Games allow people to vent their emotions, instead of using violence.
Talk for yourself!
I always leave the games of CS when I enter CT side or when we've achieved the first win by a successful plant ;D
The biggest waste is government. They are parasites on society.
The biggest drivers of economy and innovation are happiness and freedom.
I have no way to factually check that but I wish it was true and that I could preach it =P
That is $91 billion in money that could have been spent on more useful things, and billions of hours of lost productivity. This is an incredibly disappointing statistic, to know just how much money and time we waste on things that just aren't important.
I predict that you shall survive to be 112... Solely because no-one will ever invite you to go somewhere dangerous or even remotely interesting.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
No more absurd than throwing a ball through a hoop or hitting a ball through a hole in the ground.
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
People complaining about people being so effective and/or frugal that they have leisure time instead of working 24x7 should have their head examined. Hampering productivity like you need to dig this with a spoon instead of a shovel or a bulldozer is a waste. Using the bulldozer so you can go home and "waste" your time playing games is a feature, not a bug. Unless you're a sociopath CEO trying to extract more profit from your employees so you can buy a bigger yacht.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Gaming is for computing what porn is for video: The driving force for development.
In video, porn drives the low end, but Hollywood drives the high end. (Thanks, Mr. Cameron.) In computing, gaming drives the low end, but scientific computing drives the high end, as you say.
If you didn't buy graphics cards that cost 500+ bucks, they would cost about 10,000 bucks, if they were available at all, and I could probably not do what I'm doing today.
If scientific computing demanded silicon that looks like this, then it would have driven that demand and then we would have got better gaming out of it as a result as companies looked for ways to re-use those designs. The founders of 3dfx were all SGI alumni, and SGI developed graphics hardware to do work. That trickled down to consumers both via 3dfx and through Nintendo's relationship with SGI, producing the N64. I presume it will go in the current direction until either something else becomes more interesting than video gaming, or the graphics become functionally photorealistic and consumers stop demanding faster GPUs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unless you're a sociopath CEO trying to extract more profit from your employees so you can buy a bigger yacht.
I have a certain amount of sympathy for the notion of buying a bigger yacht. When someone spends real money on things which are genuinely expensive to make, then people actually make money. The big problem is people extracting more profit from their employees simply to make some numbers in some bank accounts bigger. If they make their yacht bigger, someone will have to build a yacht. If they make their stock portfolio bigger, the consequences could be positive or negative, or both. If they make their bank account bigger, it does fuck-all — because they're doing it with some offshoring system and actually hiding it in a corporation and not an account at all, and the money isn't even being loaned out to people trying to start businesses and employ others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No more absurd than throwing a ball through a hoop or hitting a ball through a hole in the ground.
I disagree. I mean, hitting a ball through a hole in the ground is bullshit. It's something that was invented because it was convenient, and the maintenance of golf courses is an environmental catastrophe. But throwing a ball through a hoop develops useful motor skills. This is not to imply that golfing is trivial, only that the skills you will develop are quite useless.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GPU's haven't hit the level that CPU's do in terms of miniaturization yet. Current crop of GPU's are ~16-20nm, while CPU's are just starting production at 10nm. As well, there is a lot more GPU offloading going on these days then CPU offloading. One of the big problems has been memory bandwidth, and it almost always has been a huge problem with GPU's. Luckily HBM covers most of those issues, and in turn has pushed the next gen of memory to the desktop side. That in itself is good all the way around, since it's helped push DDR5 memory prices way-way down.
Om, nomnomnom...
The difference is that nothing that comes out of Hollywood will any time soon be available to you. Did Hollywood create awesome effects? Sure. Are they available to the hobbyist and end user? Hardly.
Yes, scientific needs also drives development of solutions for those scientific purposes, but they do not enter a mass market. That only happens when there is a demand for this. Yes, SGI created incredible graphics machines long before the advent of 3D accelerator cards, but those cards only became a thing once there was a market for them, once there were gamers who demanded them and games that supported them. Without games, SGI (or some successor) would probably today create machines that cost a million dollars that create graphics on par with what a 1080 GTX can produce, simply due to the laws of market.
Hardware, like pretty much anything in the area of computing, is a business with an insane fixed cost and very low to negligible per unit costs. Being able to sell twice the number of units pretty much halves the costs per unit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because posting on /. obviously puts you on moral high ground...
Where's your crusade against twitter, facebook and texting? Where's your righteous indignation at the $40 billion spent on Hollywood movies at the box office alone in 2015? Where's your outrage at the ridiculous time and money wasted on professional sports, or propping up two-faced politicians, or Walmart's craptastic plastic future-landfill products?
Would you have the same apoplectic meltdown if the games people played were chess or backgammon? WTF is the difference if its on a screen, for the most part played with or against other humans anyway?
At least its an engagement of one's mind in an interactive activity, rather than drooling and staring at predictable regurgitations of fart jokes and "mystery" shows that pervade modern television. Or worse. the never ending one-upmanship of opportunistic narcissistic idiots trying to come up with the next outrageous statement that goes viral.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Go check out the statistics on gambling. Or horses. Like, who needs a horse? Really?
and STILL haven't seen a good release day for PC games in 2016 for $60 titles...Dishonored 2, Batman...I'm looking at YOU.
Without those $91 billion in entertainment, people wouldn't be as productive as they are, being deprived from their favorite hobby during their leisure time. This also disregards an entire industry of people who work producing, selling and distributing these games.
says the AC with incorrect assuptions
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
But you don't get sucked in do you? Yes you do.
Yes, I do, that's the point. I work really hard, so when I play I don't let assholes ruin it for me.
Which we know you don't. You are loosing your choice and don't even realize it.
You don't know shit about me.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.