A graph to retrace 50 years of video game history? It will not be a question of focusing on the games or the gameplay… but on the money!
Born in the early 1970s under the leadership of the American company Atari, video games have had a tumultuous history with ups and downs. For the most famous “low”, it is obviously the crash of 1985.
On the other hand, for the “tops”, it is undoubtedly harder to point the finger to the extent that the leisure continues to experience significant growth with mobile gaming which clearly dominates the game.
Start of “hostilities”: 1971, in the United States
Using data from the British firm Pelham Smithers, the site’s graphic designers Visual Capitalist have developed a remarkable graph to retrace 50 years of video game history.
50 years certainly, but observed through the prism of turnover and by focusing not on franchises or companies, but on sectors of activity, since the timid beginnings in arcades of the Atari company with games like Computer Space (1971) and Pong (1972).
Very quickly, however, companies had the idea of carrying “ the arcade at home » according to a time-honored phrase that players heard dozens and dozens of times before it became a reality.
It is September 1977, the Atari VCS (Video Computer Systems) is launched in the United States. It would later be renamed the Atari 2600, but the video game revolution was underway with the possibility of connecting cartridges and, therefore, no longer being limited to the original games planned.
3 million unsold ET cartridges were buried by Atari © Juan Carlos Llorca/AP
The return of consoles, PC… and mobile!
However, the video game industry is growing too quickly and everyone wants their piece of the pie to the point of doing anything. The quality of games declined and, in 1983-84, there was the famous crash of the sector, revenues collapsed.
The overall turnover went from a little more than 42 billion dollars at the peak of 1982 to less than 18 billion at the trough of 1985. The recovery then came, slowly, driven by consoles, but it also saw the emergence of the PC as a profitable platform.
From 1989 to 2018, portable consoles enjoyed some success, but they were mostly overshadowed by mobile. In the mid-90s, the latter appeared and, from 2010-2012, it exploded to the point of representing, in 2022, 101 billion dollars or 55.3% of the overall turnover of the entire industry. video game. A heavyweight.
Regularly condemned, PC video games have never done so well. Still in 2022, it represents $45 billion in turnover and ranks second (24.5%) ahead of the console world at $30 billion (16.6%).
The share of arcade (1.1%) is today anecdotal while virtual reality is progressing, it stands at 2.5% with 5 billion dollars. Please note that the data collected by Visual Capitalist focus on software revenue: that generated by games. In fact, everything material is not taken into account… and neither is the notion of profits.
Let us actually remember that despite the apparent good health of the sector, many development studios are in great difficulty, whether they are independent or integrated into large structures.
Source : Visual Capitalist
5