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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.
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.