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.

Comments

VIDEO GAMES

[Quakeulf]

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.

Re:VIDEO GAMES

[guises]

Er... what? There are some AAA like that, I suppose. The ones which get most of the publicity and money tend to be multiplayer focused though. If you want to insult Call of Duty I'm not going to stand in your way, but "passive" just isn't accurate.

I guess if you only play the single player campaign then maybe it's possible (I haven't played a Call of Duty in a long time), but that's really not what the game is about at this point.

Re:VIDEO GAMES

[AmiMoJo]

It's possible to do both.

Back in the late 90s Japanese shoot-em-ups realized that it was great fun for players to have a relatively easy game with a spectacular amount of stuff on screen and mega-powerful weapons to cut through waves of enemies, but they also included some extra mechanics in the scoring for players who wanted a real challenge.

Western developers could learn from that... Many seem to be stuck with tired old ideas like putting in vast amounts of crap to collect, or offering the real challenge via DLC, or just making the bad guys bulletproof on higher difficulty levels.

Re:What a waste!

[MrKaos]

Time I choose to waste, isn't wasted time.

Minority hobby?

[MCROnline]

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?

Re:Minority hobby?

[Mashiki]

It is a legitimate hobby. But then again, you had people who believed that gearheads of the 40's and 50's and working on cars was the path to gangs, violence and all that. The same people who say gaming isn't a hobby, are the same types ~30 years ago that would have been spouting that D&D creates satanists(because D&D isn't a hobby). And DOOM makes kids into serial killers. And are likely right there saying that gaming is sexist/racist/misogynist today.

Re:What a waste!

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:What a waste!

[johannesg]

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.

Re:What a waste!

[Opportunist]

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.