World market for video gaming worth €54bn

The global video gaming market is now worth an estimated €53.9bn a year and is set to grow 11.1% a year until 2017, boosted by a new generation of consoles and the increasing popularity of online games.

Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, which are jostling for control of the gaming market, have each released the latest versions of their consoles ahead of the Christmas shopping season.

The wave of new devices is expected to keep the market buoyant until 2017, IDATE said. The market is expected to soar to €82.1bn in 2017, according to France-based digital research and consultancy firm IDATE.

Home consoles like Sony’s PlayStation or Microsoft’s Xbox, which make up 31% of the market today, are expected to have a 40% share in 2017.

Handheld consoles such as Nintendo’s 3DS or Sony’s PSVita, which have a share of about 22% in 2013, are projected to record declining share to 13% in 2017, in the face of increasing strong competition from tablets and mobile phones.

“Smartphones and tablets offer a radically different experience, and in terms of the budget the tablet is a significant competitor for the consoles,” Laurent Michaud, who is in charge of gaming research at IDATE.

“The choice of purchase between the tablet and the console will determine the success of this generation of machines,” he said.

The offline computer game is expected to record an irreversible decline, while this year online games are emerging as the leader.

The increasing popularity of online games stems from the fact they dominate the gaming industry in China and South Korea, Michaud noted.

“They are games oriented towards ‘Free2Play’ and it is no surprise that they are gaining colossal success because the games are good,” he said, referring to the downloadable games.

One example is the online game Candy Crush, which records 700m sessions a day and racks up daily sales of €630,000.

Online games are expected to record average growth of 11.4% while mobile gaming is seen progressing by 12.2% annually between 2013 and 2017.

Traditional game developers, who are used to selling physical copies of their games on discs, have not been keeping pace with virtual ones. Many were slow to exploit the phenomenal success of games played on social networks.

In Dec 2012, only Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Namco Bandai Games, Konami, Take Two Interactive, and Disney Interactive Studio were present on Facebook.