The dominant sectors of the market, comfortably ensconced in their respective media, never imagined that, in recent years, the video game industry would reach the relevance it has today.
A new, somewhat unknown player is dictating the rules of the game, to paraphrase the term.
Mobile phones, desktop computers, tablets, traditional consoles, nothing escapes its influence. Many users even use images of the games that are in fashion for their own profiles.
The evolution of the global video game market: a new industry model.
This new market participant (let's call it "gaming" to synthesise and generalise the term) has generated in just a couple of decades, a profound revolution that goes beyond simple entertainment and ends up having social, cultural and economic implications, but - fundamentally - creating a new and interesting business model that changes according to the tastes of users in ever shorter periods of time.
Unlike other media industries such as cinema, radio and TV, whose growth has been much slower and gradual, video games have reached in a few years (we can simplify by saying that the real "explosion" comes after the year 2000) such a dimension that they have become the object of great interest and investment.
In this way, video games have changed their traditional ludic conception as generic entertainment, to a business conception like any other activity producing goods and services that they manufacture and sell, that is, a commercial enterprise like any other subject to the fluctuations of the market and its rules, which basically uses the Internet as an instrument for the expansion and distribution of video games, placing the different information, entertainment and communication platforms instantaneously at the service of users ("gamers").
Video games and the phenomenal instrument that is the Internet.
Also using this phenomenal instrument that is the Internet and the connectivity it offers (starting this year with 5G), mobile devices are emerging, which will incorporate video games, first simpler and now more sophisticated, as soon as connectivity allows, expanding and accelerating their opportunities for growth in the international market.
This expansion leads us to think about what is the real limit in this new industry. AI is present in many of them and manages to make players interact as if they were part of the game itself.
Is there really a business model applied to video games that is so effective that it will last over time, or will it have to be subject to continuous updating in the future to try to continue capturing the attention of an already impressive market of users?
The big players in the video game industry have been forced to adopt a highly dynamic attitude to counteract the static effect that had distinguished them in the past.
The video games industry - however much a traditional sector of society tries to prove otherwise - is one of the new economic sectors that is directly involved in the development, distribution, marketing, sale of software and hardware in general, promoting new models of computers, mobile phones and tablets that are increasingly more powerful in order to fully enjoy the new possibilities that gaming has to offer.
It is not only the game as a ludic concept but the entire electronics industry that drags behind it, thus associating a productive model that brings together different work disciplines and employs thousands of people all over the world.
But the extremely dynamic nature of this industry means that it must reinvent itself and continue to evolve, otherwise its demise will be decreed in the very near future, and for this it must rely mainly on technological advances, migrating slowly but steadily and consistently towards the digital world.
To give an idea of the evolution of this new industry, just one fact is enough: in the last two decades, gaming has produced more money than film and music - the two together - did in the same period.
Gaming has existed since the very beginnings of smoking.
We can find that since ancient times, either to amuse or entertain people or to add activities that served to exercise various capacities or skills, until - over the years and centuries - it became part of economic activities, from the very moment it was discovered that people thought it was fair to pay for entertainment.
This led numerous intellectuals in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history - just look at the numerous strategy games - and pedagogy among other disciplines to express their own interpretative theories on mismogaming and, especially, on its potentialities, obviously also warning about the risks that the use and abuse of this activity could bring to the users.
However, despite the numerous criticisms in the past, the video game industry, assuming a low profile, rather timid, and without a certain appearance of going deeper into the intellectual aspect beyond its traditional playful conception, was making its way in a tremendously competitive market to the point of revolutionising and worrying many of the big players in the media market, comfortably and carefree for many decades, in the shadow of the profits obtained.
This new model in the video game industry has forced them to constantly update themselves to complement and even accompany this new player, provoking - in turn - a profound revolution with social, cultural and economic implications, and at the same time creating new and interesting business models which are changing in shorter and shorter periods of time, causing a dynamic effect of remarkable energy and importance.
A new product - born paradoxically in the academic and military.
We are in the presence of a new product - born paradoxically in the academic and military sphere - that has established itself with deep roots in mass consumption, constantly reinventing itself and exerting an impact of remarkable consequences not only on the new generations who saw video games as a new audiovisual medium that would allow them to star in their own stories, but also on other sectors of society that have defined new generations of gamers. I had already talked about Generation Z and Millenials in this post.
From the earliest times we have always found people playing games and testimony to this are the numerous archaeological remains, geroglyphics from the Ancient Ages, especially in the Egypt of the pharaohs, pots, paintings and writings that testify to the importance of the game in humanity, which makes it practically impossible to determine the exact moment when the game was born.
These ancient games, at the very dawn of humanity, rustic and primitive if you will, have evolved to meet the current reality where we see a real video game industry and its relationship with the video market and coupled with a new business model of video games and the internet.
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Source images: Newzoo.
About Giampaolo Rossi.
At one end of the screen, a small line. Opposite it, another line. And, in the middle, a dot moving from side to side. Above, a marker. And nothing else. So the Pong player not only required skill with the controller, to move their line up and down and try to hit that little white spot. They also had to use their imagination, to believe they were hitting a ball in a fast-paced game of table tennis.
ReplyDeleteMore than 50 years have passed since the first commercially successful video game, and practically everything has changed. Today, there are multi-million-dollar blockbusters, online competitions between thousands of users, sophisticated and complex plots, cutting-edge consoles and joysticks, and almost photorealistic graphics that barely require any effort from the imagination. However, the underlying debate often resembles that pioneering work: two sides, and a dispute in black and white.
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