Research firm Gartner predicts we'll pay out 10% more on games this year than in 2010. And spending is set to top $100bn in 2015
If you thinking you spend a lot on video games, you're clearly not alone. Research firm Gartner has predicted this week that sales of games hardware and software will hit $74bn this year, up 10.4% from the 2010 figure of $67bn. Within the software segment, the company expects mobile gaming to become ever more important: driven by the rise in popularity of smartphones and tablets, its share of the sector will grow from 15% in 2010 to 20% in 2015. Here's a chart I threw together in Google Speadsheets:
Online gaming is expected to experience growth at the expense of retail sales, as the popularity of digital distribution and free-to-play browser games explodes. Interestingly, Gartner expects the revenue from subscription-based titles like World of Warcraft to fall as micro-transactions and other freemium elements gain strength, thanks in part to the huge popularity of freemium-based social games like FarmVille.
"Users have become multichannel-oriented by choice and expect vendors to continue to deliver quality content and experiences by extending their gaming possibilities across multiple platforms," said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner. "If today's mobile technology does not evolve quickly enough, the gaming industry is set to see the rate of innovation severely decline. Alternatively, it will provide opportunities in technology and content genres that we can't foresee today."
So, we can probably expect an era of cross-platform entertainment, in which games arrive on console, PC, smartphone and tablet, with lots of interconnectivity between them. We can also expect a lot more high profile buyouts as traditional gaming giants such as EA and Activision attempt to gain more leverage in the emerging social and smartphone markets.
Meanwhile, a report compiled by games market research firm Newzoo suggests that the majority of UK nationals are now active gamers. 31 million of us now pay for games in Britain, and we're likely to spend �3.6bn on them this year (slightly less than the �3.7bn we spent last year.) UK gamers apparently play on games for a total of 43,000,000 hours a day with 21% of that time spent on consoles and 18% on social games; again, it seems social and online gaming are catching up with the traditional console sector.
You can study the infographics here.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/jul/06/gartner-global-game-spending
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