Worldwide Gaming Market Hits $91 Billion In 2016, Says Report (venturebeat.com) 76
According to a new SuperData Research report, the worldwide gaming market was worth a whopping $91 billion this year, with mobile gaming leading the way with a total estimated market value of $41 billion. The PC gaming market did very well too, as it pulled in nearly $36 billion over the year. PC Gamer reports: 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, SuperData said. Mobile gaming was driven by blockbuster hits like Pokemon Go and Clash Royale. The mobile games market has started to mature and now more closely resembles traditional games publishing, requiring ever higher production values and marketing spend. Monster Strike was the No. 1 mobile game, with $1.3 billion in revenue. VR grew to $2.7 billion in 2016. Gaming video reached $4.4 billion, up 34 percent. Consumers increasingly download games directly to their consoles, spending $6.6 billion on digital downloads in 2016. PC gaming continues to do well, earning $34 billion (up 6.7 percent) and driven largely by free-to-play online titles and downloadable games. Incumbents like League of Legends together with newcomers like Overwatch are driving the growth in PC games. PC gamers also saw a big improvement with the release of a new generation of graphics cards, offering a 40 percent increase in graphics power and a 20 percent reduction of power consumption.
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Games allow people to vent their emotions, instead of using violence.
It can help develop skills and foster creativity.
Game development pushes technology further.
People waste their money on all sorts of things:
- Fashion
- Alcohol
The biggest waste is government. They are parasites on society.
The biggest drivers of economy and innovation are happiness and freedom.
Government is the worst enemy of both those.
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Games allow people to vent their emotions, instead of using violence.
Talk for yourself!
I always leave the games of CS when I enter CT side or when we've achieved the first win by a successful plant ;D
The biggest waste is government. They are parasites on society.
The biggest drivers of economy and innovation are happiness and freedom.
I have no way to factually check that but I wish it was true and that I could preach it =P
Re:What a waste! (Score:5, Insightful)
Time I choose to waste, isn't wasted time.
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But you don't get sucked in do you? Yes you do.
Yes, I do, that's the point. I work really hard, so when I play I don't let assholes ruin it for me.
Which we know you don't. You are loosing your choice and don't even realize it.
You don't know shit about me.
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Re:What a waste! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gaming is for computing what porn is for video: The driving force for development.
Face it, what "sensible" application needs stronger and stronger CPUs and GPUs? Cryptography, yes. Visual design, ok. And now something that could actually drive such development because there is a mass market for it. Well? What office PC needs a CPU/GPU that can do a fantastic amount of calculations per second?
You might have no use for gaming, that's ok. I do. I am in the area of cryptography research, and believe me, I love those faster and faster GPUs that make more and more statistical attacks feasible. Yes, those people wasting their time shooting flashy pixels in their spare time help drive my field.
And I want to thank you for that. If you didn't buy graphics cards that cost 500+ bucks, they would cost about 10,000 bucks, if they were available at all, and I could probably not do what I'm doing today.
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Gaming is for computing what porn is for video: The driving force for development.
In video, porn drives the low end, but Hollywood drives the high end. (Thanks, Mr. Cameron.) In computing, gaming drives the low end, but scientific computing drives the high end, as you say.
If you didn't buy graphics cards that cost 500+ bucks, they would cost about 10,000 bucks, if they were available at all, and I could probably not do what I'm doing today.
If scientific computing demanded silicon that looks like this, then it would have driven that demand and then we would have got better gaming out of it as a result as companies looked for ways to re-use those designs. The founders of 3dfx were all SGI alumni, and SGI developed graphics hardware to do work. That trickled
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GPU's haven't hit the level that CPU's do in terms of miniaturization yet. Current crop of GPU's are ~16-20nm, while CPU's are just starting production at 10nm. As well, there is a lot more GPU offloading going on these days then CPU offloading. One of the big problems has been memory bandwidth, and it almost always has been a huge problem with GPU's. Luckily HBM covers most of those issues, and in turn has pushed the next gen of memory to the desktop side. That in itself is good all the way around, si
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The difference is that nothing that comes out of Hollywood will any time soon be available to you. Did Hollywood create awesome effects? Sure. Are they available to the hobbyist and end user? Hardly.
Yes, scientific needs also drives development of solutions for those scientific purposes, but they do not enter a mass market. That only happens when there is a demand for this. Yes, SGI created incredible graphics machines long before the advent of 3D accelerator cards, but those cards only became a thing once
Re:What a waste! (Score:5, Funny)
That is $91 billion in money that could have been spent on more useful things, and billions of hours of lost productivity. This is an incredibly disappointing statistic, to know just how much money and time we waste on things that just aren't important.
People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
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People posting on slashdot should really not complain about lost productivity.
People complaining about people being so effective and/or frugal that they have leisure time instead of working 24x7 should have their head examined. Hampering productivity like you need to dig this with a spoon instead of a shovel or a bulldozer is a waste. Using the bulldozer so you can go home and "waste" your time playing games is a feature, not a bug. Unless you're a sociopath CEO trying to extract more profit from your employees so you can buy a bigger yacht.
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Unless you're a sociopath CEO trying to extract more profit from your employees so you can buy a bigger yacht.
I have a certain amount of sympathy for the notion of buying a bigger yacht. When someone spends real money on things which are genuinely expensive to make, then people actually make money. The big problem is people extracting more profit from their employees simply to make some numbers in some bank accounts bigger. If they make their yacht bigger, someone will have to build a yacht. If they make their stock portfolio bigger, the consequences could be positive or negative, or both. If they make their bank a
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Go check out the statistics on gambling. Or horses. Like, who needs a horse? Really?
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The money was just used to perform a transaction.
They wasn't wasted.
You're free to argue the wrong product has been produced though but obviously those paying the $91 billion didn't think so.
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That is $91 billion in money that could have been spent on more useful things, and billions of hours of lost productivity. This is an incredibly disappointing statistic, to know just how much money and time we waste on things that just aren't important.
I predict that you shall survive to be 112... Solely because no-one will ever invite you to go somewhere dangerous or even remotely interesting.
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No more absurd than throwing a ball through a hoop or hitting a ball through a hole in the ground.
I disagree. I mean, hitting a ball through a hole in the ground is bullshit. It's something that was invented because it was convenient, and the maintenance of golf courses is an environmental catastrophe. But throwing a ball through a hoop develops useful motor skills. This is not to imply that golfing is trivial, only that the skills you will develop are quite useless.
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Where's your crusade against twitter, facebook and texting? Where's your righteous indignation at the $40 billion spent on Hollywood movies at the box office alone in 2015? Where's your outrage at the ridiculous time and money wasted on professional sports, or propping up two-faced politicians, or Walmart's craptastic plastic future-landfill products?
Would you have the same apoplectic meltdown if the games people played were chess or bac
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VIDEO GAMES (Score:4, Interesting)
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I guess if you only play the single player campaign then maybe it's possible (I haven't played a Call of Duty in a long time), but that's really not what the game is about at this point.
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If I wanted to insult CoD I'd not go for the cutscenes but rather for people being stupid enough to buy the same game over and over and over.
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If I wanted to insult CoD I'd not go for the cutscenes but rather for people being stupid enough to buy the same game over and over and over.
A lot of people say they would pay for an improved version of the same thing, but CoD players (or similar... Madden was always the poster child after all) are putting their money where their mouth is. They're funding the ongoing development, incremental improvements, generation of new assets, and so on. For their $50ish dollars they are getting many, many hours of entertainment, however same-y it might be.
Personally, I am a cheap bastard, so I tend to play games with even lower up front costs. They are ofte
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Well, yes and no, and actually, the studios start cutting back on the cutscenes by now, because they noticed that they piss off the players more than they enhance the story. Don't get me wrong, watching a cool, action packed short scene can be great, but playing a game over from the start and having to sit through 10 minutes of unskipable intro footage is about as popular as an unskipable DVD intro.
Studios have noticed that by now, especially now that reviewers and bloggers have come to put a focus on such
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Studios have also cut down on pre-rendered cutscenes because they're obscenely expensive to produce, and these day, with graphical fidelity what it is, you might as well your in-game assets for in-game cutscenes where needed. It's far less jarring.
But more than that, when your character in a cinematic does something really cool, you tend to think "why couldn't I have done that?" I think it's a very welcome trend to see cinematics that advance story or enhance emotional connections, but NOT using them at b
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It's possible to do both.
Back in the late 90s Japanese shoot-em-ups realized that it was great fun for players to have a relatively easy game with a spectacular amount of stuff on screen and mega-powerful weapons to cut through waves of enemies, but they also included some extra mechanics in the scoring for players who wanted a real challenge.
Western developers could learn from that... Many seem to be stuck with tired old ideas like putting in vast amounts of crap to collect, or offering the real challenge
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Western developers could learn from that... Many seem to be stuck with tired old ideas like putting in vast amounts of crap to collect, or offering the real challenge via DLC, or just making the bad guys bulletproof on higher difficulty levels.
Achievements have killed that dead in AAA games. If it's actually difficult to get them all (as opposed to merely tedious) then people will cry about it.
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At the same time AAA-games are becoming more like movies with less interaction and more passive watching of cutscenes, and this will continue until there is no distinguishing element between film and game left.
I agree with you. I think if they took something like the Assassin's Creed movie and cut it down and added some gameplay they'd end up with a pretty good video game.
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At the same time AAA-games are becoming more like movies with less interaction and more passive watching of cutscenes, and this will continue until there is no distinguishing element between film and game left.
Which is why I'm glad to be a part of the PC Gaming Master Race.
The best thing the Filthy Console Peasants have to look forward to is pressing X to watch COD.
OK to be fair some AAA games are actually good, such as Fallout 4 and as soon as 2K fix it, Mafia III. However I've given up on that consolised crap like Battlefield.
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I guess you haven't played Dark Souls 3, Fallout 4, Forza Horizon 3, Overwatch, Doom, Hitman, XCom 2, etc. A game that tried to go in this direction, The Order 1886, was heavily criticized for doing so. Not sure if it's as bleak as you make it out to be.
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Minority hobby? (Score:5, Interesting)
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What's a "legitimate hobby"?
Re:Minority hobby? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a legitimate hobby. But then again, you had people who believed that gearheads of the 40's and 50's and working on cars was the path to gangs, violence and all that. The same people who say gaming isn't a hobby, are the same types ~30 years ago that would have been spouting that D&D creates satanists(because D&D isn't a hobby). And DOOM makes kids into serial killers. And are likely right there saying that gaming is sexist/racist/misogynist today.
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For most people gaming isn't a hobby, any more than watching movies or reading books is a hobby. A hobby is something you do to achieve some goal (usually self-improvement), as opposed to something you do just for entertainment. Of course there are people who do play video games as a hobby, but mostly it's just entertainment.
As for the sexist/misogynist criticism, I know you haven't actually seen Tropes vs. Women but those videos are very careful only to make that claim where it is really justified. Most of
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For most people gaming isn't a hobby, any more than watching movies or reading books is a hobby. A hobby is something you do to achieve some goal (usually self-improvement), as opposed to something you do just for entertainment. Of course there are people who do play video games as a hobby, but mostly it's just entertainment.
Thanks for proving that you don't know what a hobby is. I'll wait with baited breath as you trot out that gamers are dead.
As for the sexist/misogynist criticism, I know you haven't actually seen Tropes vs. Women but those videos are very careful only to make that claim where it is really justified.
You mean like the "there's no sexy men" and "I can't look at batman's ass" because she too stupid to figure out that not only can you change his suit. But while wearing the cape it's a "stiff piece of equipment used for flight." Hey, I can stare at Geralt's tight ass all I want though. Or would you like me to start into the parts where she cites articles that don't exist, or have f
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Or would you like me to start into the....
Yes. Please lay out your criticisms, complete with citations, quotations and links to the material in dispute. I can't debunk your vague accusations without them.
As for Batman's cape, have you actually seen it in motion? It's clearly not "stiff", it's standard cloth physics. Also note that just because you can change the costume or find contrary examples, that doesn't actually contradict what is being said. The fact remains that many male characters do get strategic butt coverings, where it is exceptionally
How is Steam counted? (Score:2)
Is it considered "download", "PC", "retail", ...? How would the researchers even know, considering that Valve is not (to the best of my knowledge) publishing data on its sales?
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Likely download though not necessarily free to play, I don't know where they count all the "gambling" aspect of ValveÂs own products though (the skins and hats.)
All that money... (Score:1)