As part of the Library’s work to engage with the creative industries, my colleague Fran Taylor has been finding out some of the key facts and figures about the UK games sector. We’d like to encourage games makers to use our collections for inspiration and contextual research and to use the Business & IP Centre to commercialise their ideas. Fran used the Business & IP Centre’s resources to gather it all together, including reports from Euromonitor, Datamonitor and online NESTA reports.
1. In 2009, the global video gaming market was estimated to be worth approximately $72.2bn. It is expected to grow by 5.1% during the period 2009–14, to reach $92.5bn in 2014. Software revenues are worth 69.4% of total revenues.
2. The UK video games industry was worth £2.8bn in 2010, which is bigger than its music or film industries.
3. In the UK, the most popular brands are the Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Kinect and Call of Duty.
4. Almost one third of all people older than 16 in the UK describe themselves as ‘gamers’ (with an equal breakdown between men and women). The percentage goes up to 74% for people between the ages of 16 and 19.
5. One in every two UK houses owns a video games console.
6. The profile of the industry is changing, with a new breed of games developers working as sole-traders, freelancers and in small companies. Growth is expected at the lower end of the price range, i.e. online and mobile games.
7. The online gaming segment is rapidly gaining traction and is gradually overtaking the PC and console gaming segments. Business Insights forecasts that online gaming revenues will increase from $13.2bn in 2009 to $25.3bn in 2014.
8. The global PC gaming market was estimated at a value of $4.5bn in 2009, and is likely to erode to $4.3bn by 2014, posting a decline in of 0.9% CAGR during the period.
9. Mobile games are the fastest growing segment of the video gaming market, with a forecast CAGR of 14.4% during the period 2009–14. Increasing mobile and 3G and 4G penetration are the key market drivers.
10. Emerging technologies that are in a much more advanced stage of development include thought-based games, motion sensors, connected TV and HTML5.