By Lily Asis
SOURCE: Pexels
The online gaming industry has changed a lot over the years. Each week, month and year new games are being launched. The funny thing is that the games don’t change that much, but the technology seems to. The games of poker, blackjack, spades, solitaire, Tetris, Pac-Man, Minecraft, etc. all have very specific methods of play with minor variations, yet with new technology, gaming developers seem to make these all-time classics better and better.
In order to truly see how far we’ve come, we need to first take a look back and see where the online gaming industry started from.
SOURCE: Wikimedia
The first modern computer game, Spacewar, was launched in 1962. The basic objective of the game was to fight and destroy the enemy spaceships and asteroids. Many similar games with similar objective soon followed. In the late 70s and early 80s, personal computers became more readily available and, in turn, computer games increased in popularity. There were educational games, strategy games, and games that simulated sports like golf, hockey, etc. There were also action games, quiz games and so on.
Online games – a new trend in the late 90s, was a “game changer” for the overall industry. These internet-based games became the most popular because of the amount of interaction and sociability involved. Many of these games included chat rooms and/or messaging capabilities to communicate with the other players. It created a sense of community — something the basic game didn’t offer before.
By 1997 the annual income of the US-based gaming industry reached over $5.3 billion and over $10 billion worldwide.
Fast-forward to present day, and over 65% of households worldwide own a device for playing video games. In addition, 48% of people worldwide are also playing social games. 56% worldwide play on a PC, 53% worldwide play on a dedicated game console, 36% play on their smartphone, 31% play on a wireless device and 17% play on a dedicated handheld system (statistics are independent of one another). Another interesting fact is that the gender gap for video gaming has evened out a bit, with 59% of gamers being male and 41% female. This is a much smaller gap than existed even five years ago.
SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons
eSports have also emerged in the gaming world. Between 2014 and 2016, eSports increased by 43% in popularity. In 2016 games like Pokemon Go momentarily changed the way we gamed and interacted. In fact, it was so popular that Nintendo’s stock spiked by 33% after its release.
In summary, the electronic gaming industry is still on the rise, ever evolving, and constantly optimizing to deliver the next way to entertain its target market. It is a big business industry that doesn’t seem will let up anytime soon. Playing computer and video games has become a way for people to connect through different social networks from all over the world.
