Industry and Market Trends

Industry and Market Trends 

Free to play:

Free to play is one of the remaining popular games since people are mostly enjoy the free games and distributes by providing a market business approach for developers and publishers to different types of games. With so many entertainment products available, free to play helps to attract new gamers and allows them to try new things out with zero commitment to buy. People can pay absolutely nothing and still enjoy the games or they can choose to spend money and customize their experience by purchasing items through microtransactions during the game. Developers are increasingly deposing the free to play model across all platforms including mobile and consoles free is already the most popular type of game for mobile users and this trend will continue to increase. Also the next generation console will be providing support on free to play games.

E-Sports:

E-Sports are also being popular with video games as a spectator sport has grown by showing dramatically in the past two years. E-Sports fuse the multiplayer game experience in the real world physical sports as it attracted large sponsors including Monster, Red Bull and Coke. Originally popular in Asia with the main enabler for the growth of E-Sports was Twitch which made roughly around $1B to all the professional gamers are earning a comfortable living through competitive careers. Four game franchises have now had E-Sports events with a prize pool of more than $1M like league of legends, Dota 2, Call of duty and many more and at the end of the game events there is a price where a team can win a certain amount of money.

Mobile:

Games are the most popular in apps on smartphones and the developers need to plan this, smartphones and tablets with help from social media apps are changing the demographics of gamers. Like the audience is broadening to include more young people who are into gaming and more females. The flexibility of multiple devices makes games more accessible to the audiences that will previously were not associated with the video games. These online gaming trends will continue into 2015 and onwards. Game developers need to be prepared for these so they can benefit from all the opportunities that will arise from the industry growth.

Others:

The others are going global shifts to digital game distribution and broader global access to the internet has encouraged franchises to expand beyond on North America to gain global appeal to online games and developers are incorporating more diverse themes in the game genres into their games so they could attract people like the worldwide audiences and global appeal. By achieving global domination it is easier than before with cloud based technology. Online gaming companies need to plan ahead to put the right infrastructure in place to make sure that the games they make are available for the worldwide  audience but the poor online performances will only lead to games being abandonment. As a result of increased global reach 2015 should see increased global revenues as well. And also Kickstarter when it was released on 1980’s game were successfully funded through the platform and that pledgers stumped up to $89.1 million overall in the gaming industry the site saw 22,252 projects successfully funded and $529 million which it points out is more than $1,000 in a minute. These are one of the examples on how the gaming industry are trending and the market trends are rising in a high level to show how people are more interested in that type of game, last year Kickstarter made 2.2 million in their first gaming Kickstarter pledges and over 1,125 people backed over 100 gaming projects.