Let's do some market research. ...br0kenrabbit
Ah, interesting. Some good research you did, BTW (especially for a denizen of this forum....).
I'm looking at another report here which shows a lot of the same data, but does provide better context for some of those numbers:
By 2011, the worldwide gaming market will be worth $48.9 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 9.1% during the five-year period, with gains slowing every year because of the maturation of the current generation of consoles, according to the global consultancy.
So consoles do factor a bit into the global figures.
Its data includes consumer spending on games, but does not include spending on hardware and accessories.
As we know, a good amount of console spending comes from the consoles themselves and the accessories, although I'll concede that there's expensive PC hardware to be bought as well.
In the U.S., online and wireless games should see the biggest gains through 2011, as PwC predicts online will expand from an estimated $1.1 billion market last year to $2.7 billion in 2011, and wireless will double from $499 million to $1 billion.
Ah, we forgot about the explosion of the wireless platform!
In-game advertising will be a key spark for U.S. gaming revenue, growing from an estimated $80 million last year to $950 million in 2011, according to PwC. But Fenez signaled that this estimate could prove conservative as "advertisers like to reach the younger males" that many games tend to attract.
And ads!
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In this case I'm really just looking at pure numbers and not speculating about the number of users or the games that they play. As someone mentioned, there are a good number of assumptions you make going from $ -> # of gamers, and I make no claim either way, only saying that it might be closer than you think. A few more points:
- PC games in Asia tend to have an even lower price point of entry than console games here. Cybercafes are what people play on there, and microtransactions (monthly fees, money to buy clothes for your avatar, gold farming exchanges, even the act of going to the cybercafe itself) reign supreme over large PC/console purchases. I'd be interested to find out just how much of that projected $12 billion actually goes back to the developers/publishers of the games. Keyword: sales vs. spending; these reports are talking about spending.
- Again, these numbers discount any hardware sales for consoles and PC's, and even you'd have to agree that hardware sales (esp. accessories) add up to a good chunk of money whereas things are a bit murkier with PC's (e.g., buying a work PC and playing casual games on it).
- As someone mentioned, there's no data on the nature of the spending of these games, and I'm willing to bet a good amount goes towards casual games. I'm not going to go into sementics and claim that casual gamers aren't "gamers", but my observation is that there is a gaping chasm between truly casual games on the PC and what we tend to think of as "games on the PC", the truly hardcore. Credit perhaps goes to the PC for entertaining two such distinct markets on the same platform.
- If we're counting just the number of users, PC's tend to be very personal devices (one per home user) whereas consoles have enough multiplayer properties inherent to the platform to make them better party games; it's the "one XBox in a dorm room" phenomenon. If we're talking just money spent per person, I'd wager console gamers buy more consoles than most PC gamers whom would be casual.
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