- Video games have become mainstream forms of consumer entertainment
- Mobile gaming has expanded the addressable global market
- User engagement statistics show that leading game titles are gaining “market share” of leisure time
- The industry is less cyclical than ever before
- Game publishers have successfully developed new, high margin revenue streams
- Modified Reality (AR/VR) is a potentially huge long-term opportunity for the game industry
Over the past four decades, video games have emerged from basements and coin arcades into the global mainstream. The first video games sported crude black and white, two dimensional graphics. Today’s game offerings include premium console and PC-based titles featuring huge, photorealistic worlds that can take literally years to explore, as well as a vast array of smartphone-enabled mobile games. As the technology driving them has advanced, video games have also become an increasingly ubiquitous and profitable entertainment medium. The number of video gamers worldwide has exploded from 100 million to over 2 billion since 1995, implying that more than 70% of the world’s 3.7 billion internet users are also gamers (source: Statista). More importantly for investors, the video game industry now generates a large and growing stream of revenues totaling more than $100 billion annually (source: Newzoo).