Nobody can deny that the gaming industry has been through massive growth in popularity in recent years. Statistics show that there were about two billion gamers in the world in 2015, but we should expect that by 2023, the number will increase to over three billion people who like to play video games.
There are several factors that led to a huge increase in popularity, and we’re glad to present them to you below. Although it may have its downsides, gaming will always be fun, entertaining, and educative.
The realism of the graphics
The industry went all the way from 15-year old games where you can easily count the pixels on the screen to super-realistic open-world or role-playing titles where you could swear that what you’re seeing is sheer reality. It’s especially addictive for children to grant them control over something that looks very real and in accordance with what they can see in the real world.
Games like Metro Exodus, Battlefield V, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are among the titles with the most realistic graphics. They’ll squeeze every bit of hardware power from your GPU once you play them at maximum graphical settings, but it’s sure worth it!
More focus on the storyline
While many gamers are complaining about the higher focus for the storyline that game developers add, this aspect also boosts the popularity of video games. From creations meant only for pushing buttons and stimulating your reflexes, games can compete with TV series and movies nowadays. Characters like Vito Scaletta from Mafia II or Trevor Phillips from GTA V had become insanely popular. The voices of video game characters are also often made by real actors in order to boost realism.
Adapting many situations to the real world
There are video games focused exclusively on football, NBA, rugby, hockey, warfare, racing, fighting, astronauts, general knowledge, and many more. There are games dedicated to pretty much any field you can think of. If you like to play chess or poker, for instance, you can easily find video game adaptations for them. You can do pretty much anything in games if it doesn’t involve physical activity, and getting a virtual reward at the end will make the experience even more exciting.
The huge incomes
Last but not least, we must consider the huge amounts of money that game developers make when we’re wondering why the industry grows so much. GTA V, for instance, is the second best selling game of all time after Minecraft, selling more than 140 million copies worldwide. These sold copies granted Rockstar Games an astronomical revenue of over $6 billion. Even Indie game developers such as Slither which is one of the popular .io games seem to be making a lot of revenue.
Nobody will invest in a business if there’s no profit, obviously, and the gaming industry works like a charm. This means that developers will constantly try to make video games more exciting.
If games appearing on screens are everywhere these days, whether you’re playing them on PC, console, smartphone, TV, or tablet, we can expect that Virtual Reality will lead the way in the near future. Browser games has been mainstream lately with the rise of platforms such as Poki. Putting a helmet on and getting transferred in the middle of a game is obviously much more exciting than controlling it from the outside.