SPOnG: Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot has claimed (at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival) that the games market is going to grow by 50 per cent in the next four years. Is it?
Chris Deering: Yves was talking about the overall market for people playing free games financed through advertising; games on mobiles in addition to games on PCs, various forms of handhelds, consoles and dedicated devices - this all implies a lot more ‘gameplay’.
Seemingly a consensus, or one of the conclusions of the EIF conference so far, is that we all talk about ‘convergence’ – we see the BBC is talking about doing more interactive TV, (Big Brother producer) Endemol is talking about doing more interactive shows, the virtual world-type companies are offering social chatroom-type sites with an increasingly cinematic quality of experience (Second Life, Home and so on) and the CG-movie type experiences offered by the motion-capture technology in games such as Heavenly Sword (are also on-offer).
If you think about dropping a rock in a pond – you see the ripples go out, and even though the distance between them may get smaller, the area within the expansion is quite large. So, the total number of hours played by the global gaming population (including the massive growth in China which now has 77million broadband users) is growing.
Worldwide, there is of course a specialist or hobbyist component of the market which has always existed called ‘hardcore gamers’ – which currently is around 20-million or so worldwide, up 50 per cent on five years ago and maybe twice what it was in 1995. It’s very hard to define them, but they are definitely aware of the newest technology and newest gameplay and, when faced with a lack of progress, they’ll buy a PC or upgrade it. They move back and forth between consoles and PCs, depending on wherever they can get their cutting-edge experience.
Also, take into account the increasing ease-of entry and variety in the input-output devices – look at Wii Sports for example, or EyeToy and SingStar on PlayStation - along with increasing accessibility to devices when away from a TV or computer; DS, PSP and mobile phones having more and more horsepower and bigger screens.
There is just more and more likelihood of people being in contact with a device they can have a game experience on. As games becomes more accessible and more general market – and as the world becomes more comfortable and less phobic about interactivity - there are going to be more and more ‘ripples’ going out. So, yes, it’s perfectly defensible to predict 50 per cent growth over the next five years. It’s probably going to be more than that in terms of total number of minutes and hours played, taking into account the growing ‘free’ casual market, funded by advertising, with publishers happy to convert or ‘monetize’ one in ten of those gamers.
Chris Deering: Yves was talking about the overall market for people playing free games financed through advertising; games on mobiles in addition to games on PCs, various forms of handhelds, consoles and dedicated devices - this all implies a lot more ‘gameplay’.
Ubisoft CEO, Yves Guillemot. Bullish.
If you think about dropping a rock in a pond – you see the ripples go out, and even though the distance between them may get smaller, the area within the expansion is quite large. So, the total number of hours played by the global gaming population (including the massive growth in China which now has 77million broadband users) is growing.
Worldwide, there is of course a specialist or hobbyist component of the market which has always existed called ‘hardcore gamers’ – which currently is around 20-million or so worldwide, up 50 per cent on five years ago and maybe twice what it was in 1995. It’s very hard to define them, but they are definitely aware of the newest technology and newest gameplay and, when faced with a lack of progress, they’ll buy a PC or upgrade it. They move back and forth between consoles and PCs, depending on wherever they can get their cutting-edge experience.
Also, take into account the increasing ease-of entry and variety in the input-output devices – look at Wii Sports for example, or EyeToy and SingStar on PlayStation - along with increasing accessibility to devices when away from a TV or computer; DS, PSP and mobile phones having more and more horsepower and bigger screens.
There is just more and more likelihood of people being in contact with a device they can have a game experience on. As games becomes more accessible and more general market – and as the world becomes more comfortable and less phobic about interactivity - there are going to be more and more ‘ripples’ going out. So, yes, it’s perfectly defensible to predict 50 per cent growth over the next five years. It’s probably going to be more than that in terms of total number of minutes and hours played, taking into account the growing ‘free’ casual market, funded by advertising, with publishers happy to convert or ‘monetize’ one in ten of those gamers.