In less than a decade, the gaming world will look vastly different. This is according to market research firm Newzoo, which released its latest Global Esports Market Report. According to the report, the global esports market will grow to $1.5 billion by 2022. So, what platforms will dominate this industry? Let’s take a look.
How Big is the Gaming Industry?
When discussing the most successful gaming platforms in 2022, it is of the utmost importance to first look at how big the gaming industry is as a whole. Recent statistics show that the gaming industry is much larger than even the movie industry in relation to how many countries have their own gaming industry.
More importantly, the movie industry is worth $88.3 billion, whereas the gaming industry is worth around $100 million. To put that into perspective, about 200 AA or AAA games are released yearly on Steam, a popular gaming platform. In contrast, in 2016, for example, only 93 major Hollywood films were released.
These figures don’t even represent the number of employees the gaming industry has, from PR departments to animators, character and level designers, testers, coders, voice actors, and more.
Read Gaming Revenue Up in NJ for 2022.
PC
First on the list of which gaming platforms are the most successful in 2022 is the PC. In 2020, the revenue that was generated from the global PC gaming market was around $37 billion. In 2020, it was estimated that 10,263 games were released on Steam, one of the most popular gaming platforms for PC players.
Steam is the ultimate destination for playing and discussing games, and content creators even buy Steam accounts to stand out from the crowd on social media. It has become a strategy used to gain more social media acceptance.
In addition, Microsoft launched something called Xbox Game Pass for PC, a subscription service that allows players to download as many games as they want as long as they’re listed on the platform. It’s estimated that more than 20 million people have registered for the service, which costs about $10 a month; that’s $200 million.
Another interesting fact to look at is that since the rise of the popularity of PC gaming, the mechanical keyboards market, or gaming keyboards, was worth just over $1 million in 2020 and is expected to reach $2.6 million by 2027.
Xbox
Although it’s difficult to track how many people own a PC, it is much easier to track how many people own an Xbox console. As of 2020, around about 100 million people were using an Xbox, compared to only 65 million in 2019. This information is easier to gather since people have to create a profile online to use an Xbox.
In terms of each console, 84 million Xbox 360 devices were sold, 58.5 million Xbox One devices were sold, and 12 million Xbox Series S/X were sold. In 2017 alone, 7.64 million units of the Xbox One were sold officially, which doesn’t consider the number of people who bought the console secondhand.
Surprisingly, the Xbox had a 53% market share of console operating systems in the US. It’s estimated that in 2020, $4.79 billion were made in revenue from the Xbox console series.
PlayStation
It’s also quite easy to track how many people own a PlayStation. As of June 2022, there were around 102 million monthly active users, which is actually a decrease of about 9 million since 2021. More importantly, it’s estimated that about 47 million players use PS Plus, the online subscription that players need to have to play online games, which is about $10 a month.
In terms of the number of sales per console, the PlayStation 4 sold 117.2 million devices, which is not bad since the original PlayStation sold 102.49 million devices, whereas the PlayStation Five sold 26.01 million. There is also the PlayStation Vita to consider, which is a handheld device that sold between 10 to 15 million.
As you can see, the gaming industry is very large and is expected to continue growing in the foreseeable future. Moreover, with so many technological advances within the gaming industry, it’s hard to tell what it might look like in a few years. There have been some breakthroughs in cloud gaming that would make gaming more accessible to millions upon millions of people.
