From PacMan to Pokèmon, the gaming industry has come a long way in the past 50 years. It has already been one of the biggest earning media sectors for quite a few years but in 2021, the gaming market was valued at USD 198.40 billion, which is much higher than ever before. The gaming industry has been evolving ever since it first came into being. We’ve always been playing games but you know what? The covid era made ‘gaming’ a lifestyle for many. With Web 3.0 coming into being, the industry has even more potential to grow in the next few years. Let’s look at how this industry has evolved over the years and what’s yet to come!
Back in the 1970s, there weren’t flashy graphics and fancy clothes on the screens, there were the Arcade machines and not to mention, they were quite a big thing, maybe even more than metaverse in 2022. They became popular very quickly and within a span of 10 years, they were already generating more money than the 80’s music industry as a whole!
Then came the era of Nintendo Entertainment System which was one of the longest to last! Are you for real if you haven’t spent countless hours in front of the computer screen playing Mario? Or if you haven’t jumped off your bed trying to kill that duck in Duck hunt? Just when the NES thought it had captured the world, Sony released the PlayStation in 1994. It became the first console to sell more than 100 million units and they haven’t looked back ever since!
The third major transition occurred with the launch of the online gaming industry. From Microsoft launching the Xbox Live to Nintendo capturing the handheld market by integrating game apps in Nokia and Blackberry, the gaming industry saw a lot of growth. This wasn’t it! Apple soon launched a solidified, more integrated platform – The app store, wherein people could download and play games for a fee. It took the gaming industry by the storm and the growth has been constant since then. By 2001, the gaming industry was already a billion dollar industry!
Coming to the more recent times, games like Pokémon Go and GTA were making more than $1 billion each yearly! Well, like every other industry, the gaming industry went through a great transition in the covid times. It was one of the industries to grow in the covid era! Not only did it grow, it reshaped the perception of gaming, so much that soon we’ll be living in a “game world”. If you’re familiar with AR games like Second life, you already know what metaverse is about – the only difference is um… involvement of a couple billion dollars?
While it is still in its early stage, the global ‘metaverse’ market was valued at $337.23 million in 2021 and is expected to reach $1003.06 million by 2030. There are over 2.3 billion gamers across the world and the number is constantly growing which means that more people are entering the Web 3.0 world everyday! As we always say, nobody knows the future but what we know is, the gaming industry has only seen ‘ups’ ever since it first launched. What we have to see is how it does when there’s a lot of money involved from the third parties and all the transactions are basically through ‘gaming’. It wouldn’t be fair to not mention that in 2021, the Web 3.0 market size reached USD 3.2 Billion and is expected to register a CAGR of 43.7% by the end of this year! The gaming industry has built a universe for itself, wouldn’t you wanna be there?
Sources:
50 Years of Gaming History, by Revenue Stream
