50 years of video game history in one graph
Source: HW Upgrade added 25th Nov 2020
The video game industry has registered sales for 165 billions of dollars in 2020: a study by Pelham Smithers shows how the success of the sector has increased over time, even if the factors that have decreed it continue to change
by Rosario Grasso published 25 November 2020 , at 15: 51 in the Videogames channel
Commissioned by Visual Capitalist and carried out by Pelham Smithers, the market survey aims to highlight how much and how the video game market has grown i over the years, summarizing the statistics in a single graph . We can see how in the recent period it is mainly the mobile gaming that has taken over, with the PC sector which has been able to resist and renew itself by exploiting the pull of Twitch and more recently the advent of cloud gaming services .
The history of video games is also marked by technological evolution: indeed, in some ways it is a sort of clarification of the latter. If the first video game prototypes in the years’ 50 were real laboratory experiments, the beginning of the video game industry is usually identified with the arrival of Pong in 1972. Atari was the undisputed queen of that period, first launching the home version of Pong in the 1975 and then the glorious Atari 2600 in 1977.
The history of video games: from Pong to 165 billions of dollars in sales in one year
But it was mainly the years of the coin-op arcade : beyond Pong, in fact Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong
arrived . However, the industry struggled to handle such disruptive growth. Especially Atari invested heavily and badly, thinking that the amount of stocks on the market could give further impetus. The cases of some blatant failures are famous, such as the videogame adaptation ET the Extra Terrestrial . The resulting market saturation caused the video game industry crisis in 1983, which led to a substantial compression of sales.
In the same years we witnessed the first merger between personal computers and video game systems, sealed by the market entry of Commodore 64 . Nintendo, on the other hand, focused on the quality of the games to regain the market and in the 1985 launched the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) . It was followed by another Japanese giant, Sega, which in 1988 conquered important shares of market with the glorious Mega Drive , and subsequently also triumphed in the portable console segment with the Game Gear .
As everyone knows, the real revolution would come in 1994 with the first PlayStation , equipped with a CD-ROM reader and hardware capable of processing large and polygonally complex virtual worlds. The next two PlayStation still focused on the evolution of optical media, first with DVD ( PS2 ) and then with the Blu-ray ( PS3 ). Consoles that were hugely successful, especially the PS2, to the point that Sony is still the company that has sold the most video game systems today.
Meanwhile, the development effort Microsoft on graphics libraries DirectX merges into the project Xbox , whose first incarnation dates back to 2001. Xbox was the first console equipped with an ethernet port, specifically designed for online services and multiplayer gaming. Microsoft had to wait until 2006 with Xbox 360 to obtain benefits with respect to the investment made in the sector. That generation of consoles was very important in decreeing the success of consoles, especially thanks to Nintendo Wii , launched on the market in 2006 and author of a series of important records.
Video games: a mass phenomenon
Another very important moment surely corresponds to the launch of World of Warcraft , massively multiplayer game that attracted many players to the PC. At the height of its success, the Blizzard title boasted 01 millions of subscribers. Another saga that led to many sales on PC was that of The Sims , with the first chapter released in 2000.
The world of mobile gaming begins its unstoppable ride with the launch of Apple’s first iPhone in 2007. In the world of video games this translates into the success of memorable games such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga , which with the business model free-to- play revolutionize the video game industry and the way of doing business.
Dal 2014 today the video game audience is much larger than in previous years. This is demonstrated by the market yields of games such as Pokemon Go , which has made more than a billion dollars in turnover. one year, or Grand Theft Auto V , with its sales record of one billion dollars in three days of marketing. The billionaire acquisitions of Oculus VR , by ) Facebook , of Mojang and of Zenimax by Microsoft, by King , ended in Activision , of Supercell , over at Tencent , and of Twitch (Amazon) , are the basis of a very solid growth in the turnover related to video games, which only in 2020 amounts to 165 billions of dollars.