Statista Reports Video Games to Become $360 Billion Industry by 2027
(2024-08-17, Boston, MA, Special to the U.S. Times) The video game industry is an endlessly growing financial juggernaut that, according to Forbes, generates more revenue than the movie and music industries combined.
German data collection and visualization platform Statista further highlights this growth in its newly-released market insights report for the global video game industry.
Its findings depict video games on a continued growth trajectory, projected to reach $282.3 billion in global revenue this year, with an expected annual growth rate of 8.76% between 2024 and 2027, and culminating in $363.2 billion in projected market volume.
Statista breaks down its insights into several key markets, including mobile gaming, download games, and in-game advertising, determining the size of the video game market through a “bottom-up approach,” as described by Statista’s methodology. This approach includes annual financial reports of corporations such as Microsoft, Take-Two Interactive Software, and Tencent Holdings, as well as analyzing relevant measures such as “macroeconomic indicators, historical developments, current trends, and reported performance indicators of key market players.”
An analyst opinion by Statista states, “While all other Digital Media market markets have already gone through small revolutions caused by new business models like subscription-based services, the Video Games market is only at the beginning of this development.” With cloud gaming and in-game advertising forecasted to receive most significant gains in revenue, it seems inevitable more contemporary forms of monetization will become the industry norm.
Furthermore, it remains to be seen how Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard will affect the current landscape of AAA gaming, as despite the acquisition being the biggest case of consolidation in the video game industry, Tencent and Sony still surpass Microsoft in revenue. As reported by Statista data journalist Florian Zandt, “The company behind Xbox, one of the best-known brands in the games sector, reported sales of around $15.5 billion in the gaming segment in its last annual report, down $700 million year-over-year. This might change in the tech company’s current fiscal year, which started in July 2023.”
Zandt elaborates, “This also depends on whether Xbox’s plans for its Game Pass subscription service pan out. Drastic cost-cutting by closing critically acclaimed studios like Tango Gameworks, whose latest games Hi-Fi Rush and Ghostwire: Tokyo reportedly attracted upwards of one million players each, suggests that the subscription-to-purchase pipeline doesn’t yet work as envisioned.”
For more information, check out Statista’s full market insight: https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide