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History of worldwide video game industry revenue since 1971 , by sector (arcade/console/handheld/PC), from Bloomberg

Phediuk

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Oct 27, 2017
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I don't believe there's been a thread about this, so I'm going to make one.

The other day, Bloomberg ran this article on a potential downswing in game industry revenue: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...me-top-analyst-sees-industry-slumping-in-2019

But the interesting thing about it is this graph posted in the middle of the article, which contains quite a bit of valuable information:

hSHDyoH.png


A complete, year-by-year, sector-by-sector breakdown of global gaming industry revenue, from 1971 to present.

Observations:

-Arcades were the largest sector of the gaming industry until 1997.
-Consoles were the biggest market sector every year from 1997 through 2011.
-The PC market was bigger than the console market from 1994-96, overtook consoles again in 2013, and has held its lead since
-Mobile has been the largest sector since 2012
-Before 2019 (projected), the last year of overall decline in gaming industry revenue was 1995

-Peaks of each market sector in % of annual market share:
Arcade: 1971/72/73 (100%)
Console: 1976/2000 (40%)
PC: 1995/2014/2015 (29%)
Handheld: 2007 (24%)
Mobile: 2018 (48%)
VR: 2020 (6%, projected)

-Peaks of each market sector in total revenue:
Arcade: 1982 ($27b)
Console: 2018 ($27b)
PC: 2018 ($35b)
Handheld: 2007 ($16b)
Mobile 2018 ($67b)
VR: 2020 ($8b, projected)
 
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dred

dred

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Oct 27, 2017
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This is fascinating, thanks for sharing. Mobile is such a behemoth...
 

Deleted member 18742

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It find it interesting that even during the "Great Recession" that there was no overall decline in revenue in those years
 
Mr_Antimatter

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Oct 28, 2017
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Well that explains the switch. Pure handhelds appear to be a dying sector.

Intereresting to see that consoles have been a pretty steady sector for a long time now.
 

mclem

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Oct 25, 2017
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What did Mobile mean circa 1996? Feature phones, I assume?

Interesting that it was swinging upwards before the iPhone.

Edit: Interesting, too, that Handheld has been very weak from 2013ish onwards. I thought the 3DS was still pretty potent then? Or is this chart just the US?
 
Sheepinator

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Interesting stuff. It's not clear from the graph or the article though whether the console revenue figures include all the revenue from dlc and mtx, or whether it's just total game sales.
 
BloodHound

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Oct 27, 2017
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I'm curious to know how these #s are calculated. I could have sworn, playstation as a company had an annual revenue of 20b in 2017. So if you had xbox and nintendo, it's definitely over 28b
 
ArkhamFantasy

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I assumed the reason PC blew grew during the early 2010s was because people were sick of the PS3/360, looks like the console market pretty much stayed consistent though.
 
Kill3r7

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Sheepinator said:
The graph at the bloomberg link is interactive, and it shows console revenue at $22BN in 2013 and $27BN in 2018. Surely it has grown more than 22% in 5 years, if all game spending is being counted?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It is hard to account outside of adding up the figures from all the various financial filings. 22% growth does not sound unreasonable.
 
SuikerBrood

SuikerBrood

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Jan 21, 2018
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Insane to think the total video game revenue on this graph (138.5 billion dollars) and Microsofts total revenue in their 2018 fiscal year (110.6 billion dollars) are so close. I would have thought the revenue on gaming would be much higher?
 
Horns

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Dec 7, 2018
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It puts things into perspective. Didn't realize how dominate the mobile games market was.
 
Kill3r7

Kill3r7

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ArkhamFantasy said:
I assumed the reason PC blew grew during the early 2010s was because people were sick of the PS3/360, looks like the console market pretty much stayed consistent though.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Doubt it. The PC growth correlated to more people playing games ie reaching a different/new consumer base. I don't think they are talking about AAA games per se. Also certain markets such as China are more PC centric.
 
TheHyde

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Interesting...so at least some analysts are thinking 2019 might be a turning point year?
 
Baladium

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mclem said:
What did Mobile mean circa 1996? Feature phones, I assume?

Interesting that it was swinging upwards before the iPhone.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Considering that Snake wasn't a thing until 1997, I doubt people were buying and downloading games to their cellphones much before that.

My guess is that Tamagotchi is included as part of the "mobile" game sales data in the graph. I can't think of anything else that would've played a factor in that category as far back as 1996, which was the year Tamagotchi was introduced.
 
Window

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I imagine profit margins on mobile are higher as well. Kinda surprised publishers just haven't gone all in mobiles at this point. Well they've certainly been trying but I get the feeling capital investment in consoles and PC still exceeds mobiles.
 

mclem

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Oct 25, 2017
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Baladium said:
Considering that Snake wasn't a thing until 1997, I doubt people were buying and downloading games to their cellphones much before that.

My guess is that Tamagotchi is included as part of the "mobile" game sales data in the graph. I can't think of anything else that would've played a factor in that category as far back as 1996.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Wondering if Palmpilots count, I seem to remember there was some digital software for that (that wasn't simply freeware), and given that in some ways they're spiritually a predecessor of the modern smartphone, it kinda fits.
 
Dr. Feel Good

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mclem said:
What did Mobile mean circa 1996? Feature phones, I assume?

Interesting that it was swinging upwards before the iPhone.

Edit: Interesting, too, that Handheld has been very weak from 2013ish onwards. I thought the 3DS was still pretty potent then? Or is this chart just the US?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm pretty sure mobile would include things like Palm Pilots and advanced personal assistants back then which housed very simplistic games. Mobile was always going to be big and people should have seen the writing on the wall in 2003 when Nokia (then the market leader) invested and launched the N-Gage and iPod Click Wheel games hit.

Before the iPhone we still had games like Snake, Diner Dash, Bejewled, Rayman, Solitaire, Asphalt, etc. which were major hits.
 

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SuikerBrood said:
Insane to think the total video game revenue on this graph (138.5 billion dollars) and Microsofts total revenue in their 2018 fiscal year (110.6 billion dollars) are so close. I would have thought the revenue on gaming would be much higher?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Microsoft makes bank, the xbox brand is basically a side project to them.

Man, PC gaming has exploded since the dark days of 07-10.
 
Baladium

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mclem said:
Wondering if Palmpilots count, I seem to remember there was some digital software for that (that wasn't simply freeware), and given that in some ways they're spiritually a predecessor of the modern smartphone, it kinda fits.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Dr. Feel Good said:
I'm pretty sure mobile would include things like Palm Pilots and advanced personal assistants back then which housed very simplistic games. Mobile was always going to be big and people should have seen the writing on the wall in 2003 when Nokia (then the market leader) invested and launched the N-Gage and iPod Click Wheel games hit.

Before the iPhone we still had games like Snake, Diner Dash, Bejewled, Rayman, Solitaire, Asphalt, etc. which were major hits.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I wish the graph wasn't as vague as it is with its criteria. All it says is there was $1 billion in "mobile" game revenue in 1996, and that has me very curious. I mean, what's the distinction between "mobile" and "handheld" gaming in the mid-'90s really? PDAs were only just gaining momentum and the only games you could play on them were simple Tetris clones and the like. (And as far as I know there wasn't a means to purchase and download additional games to them yet either.) And if PDAs qualify, you could also throw in graphing calculators too, since by that point I'm sure some of those had the ability to play stuff like brick-breaker and pong...
 
OP
OP

Phediuk

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Oct 27, 2017
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mclem said:
What did Mobile mean circa 1996? Feature phones, I assume?

Interesting that it was swinging upwards before the iPhone.

Edit: Interesting, too, that Handheld has been very weak from 2013ish onwards. I thought the 3DS was still pretty potent then? Or is this chart just the US?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

it's worldwide.
 
Toni

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SuikerBrood said:
Insane to think the total video game revenue on this graph (138.5 billion dollars) and Microsofts total revenue in their 2018 fiscal year (110.6 billion dollars) are so close. I would have thought the revenue on gaming would be much higher?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Windows is Microsoft's biggest earning division. They have a near monopoly with Windows because the competition is almost nonexistent in that market. And every single quarterly report, Windows keeps expanding its install base and growing in revenue and also quite substantially.

Almost every other division of Microsoft grows like crazy in each quarter, which is why their revenue margins look so strong, quaterly and yearly. MS is raking on the money. And they are world's #1 company by market cap.
 
Treasure Silvergun

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Incredibly interesting. Thanks, OP!

So a few points I seem to understand from this:

- Consoles really made a step further with PS2. Until Y2K they were doing somewhat consistent numbers, even the PS1 basically making consoles a thing in Europe seems to not have shifted the needle. Perhaps the rampant piracy of those years can account for this?

- Gen 6 all but killed arcades. Makes sense. That gen basically attained arcade-quality graphics in your living room.

- As expected, mobile really exploded with the iPhone, but it was previously bigger than I thought.

- I expected handhelds to be bigger before the 2010s. The Game Boy apparently seemed a much larger phenomenon that it actually was. And is it possible that this chart completely disregards Game & Watch?
 
sibarraz

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Starset said:
It find it interesting that even during the "Great Recession" that there was no overall decline in revenue in those years
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The Great recession always felt like something than American and or Nintendo fans have overblown to make it look like gaming was about to dissapear if were not for Nintendo saving the day in the USA.

They never mention than both european and japanese markets were doing great at the time, and that even arcades were fine in the USA
 
ASaiyan

ASaiyan

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Oct 25, 2017
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A thousand incoming comments to the Bloomberg editor, on how to properly classify the Switch...

This is a really cool graph. Seems like the industry is going nowhere but up (although the quoted analyst apparently thinks otherwise). And VR is finally becoming a thing!
 
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Eoin

Eoin

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Oct 27, 2017
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Starset said:
It find it interesting that even during the "Great Recession" that there was no overall decline in revenue in those years
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There was a dip in the market excluding mobile after 2008, I assume this is at least partly attributable to the recession. It just happened that the recession started in the year that mobile gaming really started to kick into gear.

mclem said:
Edit: Interesting, too, that Handheld has been very weak from 2013ish onwards. I thought the 3DS was still pretty potent then?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The relative success of the 3DS probably should be put into context of what happened to the handheld market in general. We went from a generation with ~150M+ DS sales and almost 80M PSP sales to a generation where combined 3DS and Vita sales won't be all that much higher than the PSP's eventual total. So...we've lost almost one Nintendo DS-sized segment of that market. Nintendo managed to position themselves well enough that they only lost around half their market share, with Sony losing closer to 100% of it, so the 3DS was successful enough despite the market collapsing around it.

There's a revenue factor here as well - per-game handheld revenue has always been smaller than the console segment so the handheld market will be under-represented on a unit sales basis on this graph, though this is a constant factor throughout the graph.

Treasure Silvergun said:
- Consoles really made a step further with PS2. Until Y2K they were doing somewhat consistent numbers, even the PS1 basically making consoles a thing in Europe seems to not have shifted the needle. Perhaps the rampant piracy of those years can account for this?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It doesn't look very consistent to me. US$12BN in 1993, falling to US$5BN in 1995, rising to US$14BN again by 1999? Those are quite wide-ranging numbers.
 
The Albatross

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Eoin said:
It doesn't look very consistent to me. US$12BN in 1993, falling to US$5BN in 1995, rising to US$14BN again by 1999? Those are quite wide-ranging numbers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

These seem to coincide with major price reductions in major hardware. 1993, the Genesis cut it's price to ... $200 or whatever it was, and packed in Sonic 2, undercutting the SNES and basically pulling sales neck and neck out of nowhere. 1995, hardware sales might have dropped on the failure of those mid-decade consoles like the Philips CD-i, Atari Jaguar, 32x, and so on, while the Playstation was just starting in North America at the tail-end of '95. And then by 1999, the Playstation was selling for like $100-$150 or whatever it was, with major releases like Metal Gear Solid, RE2, Zelda: Ocarina, etc and others the year prior.

I think we often forget about those failed consoles of the mid-90s that launched on the tails of the SNES/Genesis. WHile the 32x and Saturn were noteworthy failures, they still sold much better than ... Philips CD-i, Atari Jaguar, Panasonic whatever it was, and whatever other weird consoles were thrown into the mix then.
 

Nuclear Muffin

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Really interesting graph, thanks!

Had no idea that the arcades dominated all the way up until 1997; thought that they gave way to consoles much earlier than that!

As for handhelds? This is probably a bit unfair given that handheld consoles and games have always been much cheaper than consoles/PC (so a revenue chart is always going to under-represent their market presence), but it's still sad to see how mobile just completely ate its lunch.

Fucking mobile... Even on this graph it looks like the cancerous tumour that it is!
 

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sibarraz said:
The Great recession always felt like something than American and or Nintendo fans have overblown to make it look like gaming was about to dissapear if were not for Nintendo saving the day in the USA.

They never mention than both european and japanese markets were doing great at the time, and that even arcades were fine in the USA
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Click to shrink...
The point I was implying that people were still buying video games was money was tight for a lot of middle and lower class people. That seems like one of the first things to cut out of a budget to life sustainably, entertainment
 
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