Just got back from the Austin Game Conference. A smallish show by comparison to GDC in San Francisco in March, and about the same size of the last ECTS in London. The show had a nice comfortable feel to it, and wasn’t over run with kids grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down. And if you were looking for a job as a game developer, there were plenty of hiring stands to visit.
I was interested in the technology and found lots of it. What I also found was that games permutated our lives in more ways than I had thought. Consider the places or platforms one can play electronic games on: mobile phones, PDAs, dedicated handheld game machines, game consoles, arcade machines, set top boxes, DVDs, TVs, and of course, PCs.
The kind of games vary from 2D roll and scroll things to fantastic cinematic FPS and RPGs. We can play them by ourselves, with friends in the same room, with friends on a LAN, or with friends and strangers in the either-net.
And everyone plays. It’s not just pasty faced fat boys in cut offs, it’s old guys like me, young girls like my daughter, lawyers, pilots, moms, bakers, and train engineers – literally every category, sex, and age you can think of. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say 70% to 80% of the population of the industrialized world have played electronics games and at least 70% of them play at least once a month. There have been various surveys that point this out to us (and I’m too lazy to go look them up; it would cut into my game playing time…)
But the irony of it is most of these game players, if asked, would say they don’t play electronic or computer games. Why? Because they think what you’re asking is, “Do you play first person shooter or role playing games?” They don’t think of poker on Yahoo as “game playing,” they think of it as playing poker. Duh...
So part of the problem, in getting an accurate measure of how many game players there are is the sensationalism of the best selling titles, and the bad press resulting in legislation in various countries and states. Only the people who play those types of games identify themselves with the notion of “game playing.” And when you count those people you don’t get a very big number relative to the number of phones that are sold per year, or the number of PCs that are sold each year. Also, there’s a subtle code word that game players understand that the people asking the questions don’t – computer games vs. video games. Game players on a PS2, or a DS2 are playing video games, and so are people who play arcade games. But people who play Everquest or Half Life 2 are playing computer games.
And so when you count them, the numbers are smaller still.
Then you have the dollar counters, You’ve all seen or heard that “the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry.” (The quote that gets passed around is: The $10 billion video game industry, which generates more revenue than Hollywood.) Well it’s not. The problem is how things get counted, and what gets included.
The $10 billion figure came from hardware sales with software sales and peripherals. Video games are about $28 billion worldwide. The video game software business is about $18 billion, according to DFC Intelligence, and will grow to about $26 billion by 2010.
Adams Media Research comes up with a worldwide number of around $50 billion today for the movie industry, including TV syndication fees, commercial advertising, and DVD rentals and sales. So the movie industry is about twice as large as the game industry.
But who cares? The point is, all most all of us are playing electronics games, and the game biz isn’t just about ATI and Nvidia killer cards, or Doom3 and Call of Duty. It’s entertainment, and its everywhere on every platform, and in the air.
So it IS all fun and games, and that’s why we now have a dozen game conferences world wide every year, and LAN parties (with more springing up every month), and on-line fights, frights, and romances. We B gamers.
P.S. If you like stats (like I do, which why I get invited to so many cocktail parties) take a look at:
http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/bam/www/numbers.html
