Hello All,

I’m not a gamer, (tho my hubby has been *glued* to Halo3 all over Christmas), so please forgive my limited knowledge of the benefits of one box over another, it appears to be a hotly contested issue :o)!  

I wondered if anybody could point me in the right direction to find some facts and figures about gaming trends.

What I’d like to know is whether on *average* console sale numbers are increasing or decreasing, over – say the last 5 or 10 years.  The problem I’m having is that I can find these figures for specific boxes (Wii/PSP/X360 etc.) on this wonderful website but from that I can’t easily tell overall trends, as over time one specific box sales overtake another, or one manufacturer increases or decreases in popularity.  I’m trying to understand whether the industry as a whole is increasing in size, and if so, how fast. 

An additional confusion is that of the PC Gamer, I haven’t really factored in whether that is a trend to monitor, whether people start off gaming on the PC and migrate to a dedicated console, or whether they are completely different beasts…

Anyway, thank for taking the time to read this and if anybody can help I’d be really grateful!

I don't know of a single, authoritative place you could go to get this data. Things like this usually get thrown out in occaisional press releases. Still, Google reveals a few such press releases.

In 2006, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted annual growth in the video games market of about 11% through to 2010:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=9793

In 2001, the IDSA (a trade organization which now appears to be defunct) said that the industry had grown 15% per year since 1997:

http://ign64.ign.com/articles/094/094061p1.html

In 2007, the ESA (new name for the IDSA?) reported that the industry had grown 17% per year between 2003 and 2006:

http://www.theesa.com/archives/2007/11/us_video_game_i.php


So, all-in-all, I'd say the industry is growing rather quickly, and rather steadily. This doesn't directly answer your question of whether more people are gaming, but I don't think you'd see growth like this without a broader consumer base.

Finding the hard numbers you are looking for would be very tricky. You can see the general trend happen with previous console generation numbers as the total always gets higher which would indicate a growing market. Another indicator is the fact that some current consoles are selling at a record setting pace but the compeition is still selling at a respectable amount.

PC gaming is a weird beast indeed. There are very very few that make the jump from one to the other. PC and console gaming are just too different for one to evolve into the other. As for which one is bigger, well that depends on how define who is or is not a gamer. If the people who sit and play Bejeweled for as few hours a day count as gamers, then the PC market crushes the puny console market. If you only count the more "hardcore" PC gamers then the console market is likely a fair bit larger.

Intresting stuff ioi, thanks.
when do you think China will become a large gaming market, because I was there in the summer, and I did see one or two gaming shops, but in the malls, there was not much of a gaming presence

I think that China won't be important for a long time. Their GDP per capita is around 2k (compared to around 30-40k in most developed countries). For them spending 60 bucks is like for American citzen spending 1000 bucks. China's GDP per capita may grow at around 10 per cent in upcoming years and end up at around 5k in ten years. But 5k still won't be enough for Chinase to buy video games on regular basis. It also isn't enough to percive piracy as sth wrong.

Russis is likely to see growth ahead of China I think. I travel there for business and the growth of demand (linked to sudden explosion of disposable income) for electronics is huge.

So far I've only seen Sony advertising there but I wouldn't be surprised to see Russia show strong growth for gaming.

The main issue there will be piracy though, I suspect, on the games side.

My advice: Stay away from www.nexgenwars.com, it only has false information.
I actually did a study for university project about the decline of Sega and Nintendo from 1999 - 2004. If it helps you I could send it to you

it makes sense it is growing and will continue to grow

as gamers grow older, a certain %age of them remain gamers into adulthood

meanwhile, young kids are growing up and they become gamers

so that right there will account for at least a modest increase each year for the foreseeable future

then there are the wii/ds that are appealing to people who NEVER owned a console before or people who haven't owned one since nes/snes/gameboy days...so growth should be much higher from 2006-2010 than normal

@ioi: There aren't really rich areas in China. Even in Shanghai (the richest China's city) GDP per capita is at 7.2k per year (2006). It's more than 2k but still far away from developed countries.

There are acutally more than 1.3 billion people in China but 10% per cent of them aren't as rich as Japanese (at least in nominal term). If this was true China's GDP would be bigger than Japanese (10 per cent of China's population is 130 mln people (a little more than whole Japan) so they can't be as rich as Japanese when Japan's GDP>China'S GDP).

I also think that those richer grups will just go and buy pirated soft becouse it will be a common practice in next 10 years and Chinese people won't see anything bad about it.

However it's true that 1.3 billion of people is a lot and even if China's market was developed at 10% of what it is in Japan China would have a big part of world's market share (around 15%).

PS. I just checked IMF GDP list and China's is at 2.46k per capita (2007 estimate). I'm sure it was below 2k in previous years so the big jump is either to the revision or falling dollar price (or both).

Lol

@OP:

I think that the question should take in account population growth as if te raw number of people using a particular medium rises slower than the population then the overall cultural significance of the medium gets smaller. I don't know if that is the case for gaming but you might want to think about taking it in consideration in your research.