Gaming Industry

The video game industry (sometimes referred to as the interactive entertainment industry) is the economic sector involved in the development, marketing and monetizing of video games. It encompasses dozens of job disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide.

The game industry employs those experienced in other traditional businesses, but some have an experience tailored to the game industry. Some of the disciplines specific to the game industry include game programmer, game designer, level designer, game producer, game artist and game tester. Most of these professionals are employed by video game developers or video game publishers. However, many hobbyists also produce computer games and sell them commercially.

Early on, development costs were minimal, and video games could be quite profitable. Games developed by a single programmer, or by a small team of programmers and artists, could sell hundreds of thousands of copies each. Many of these games only took a few months to create, so developers could release multiple titles per year. Thus, publishers could often be generous with benefits, such as royalties on the games sold. Many early game publishers started from this economic climate, such as Origin Systems, Sierra Entertainment, Capcom, Activision and Electronic Arts.

As computing and graphics power increased, so too did the size of development teams, as larger staffs were needed to address the ever-increasing technical and design complexities. The larger teams consist of programmers, artists, game designers, and producers. Their salaries can range anywhere from $50,000 to $120,000 generating large labour costs for firms producing video games which can often take between one and three years to develop. Now budgets typically reach millions of dollars despite the growing popularity of middleware and pre-built game engines. In addition to growing development costs, marketing budgets have grown dramatically, sometimes consisting of two to three times of the cost of development.

Games generated $91 billion worldwide in 2016.

The mobile game segment was the largest at $41 billion (up 18 percent), followed by $26 billion for retail games and $19 billion for free-to-play online games. New categories such as virtual reality, esports, and gaming video content were small in size, but they are growing fast and holding promise for 2017.

• Monster Strike was the No. 1 mobile game, with $1.3 billion in revenue.
• The esports market generated $892 million (up 19 percent) in revenue.
• Consumers increasingly download games directly to their consoles, spending $6.6 billion on digital downloads in 2016.
• C gaming continues to do well, earning $34 billion (up 6.7 percent) and driven largely by free-to-play online titles and downloadable games.