Gaming sometimes seems like a "niche," and the mainstream media certainly treats it that way. However, a comparison of the gaming market with that of movies and music shows that gaming is much larger than many people think. Hence our ears perked up when Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said last week that the video game market was poised for massive growth—a 50 percent increase over the next four years. Assuming that Guillemot isn't simply blowing fumée about his industry's growth potential (always a possibility at these kind of events), video games will soon run eclipse both box office revenues and recorded music revenues. That a lot of copies of Halo to move; is gaming really ready to get this big? Let's run the numbers. The US market We'll start with the US market, then take a look at the worldwide picture. We have collected revenue statistics from the the last five years for the music, movies, and gaming sectors; you can see them helpfully overlaid on the chart below. What you're looking at is industry revenues, expressed in billions of dollars. Gaming had some major growth, but much of it was in the past, when the industry surged from $2.6 billion in sales to $7 billion between 1996 and 2000. Over the last five years, though, none of the three categories has shown much evidence of explosive growth. Music (which includes CD sales, digital sales, music video sales, and mobile song downloads), in fact, has dropped from a peak of $14.58 billion in 1999 to only $11.5 billion in 2006, and it is expected to fall even further by 2010. The idea that games have been hurtling upward and stand ready to eclipse more traditional entertainment forms looks a bit dubious based on past data. To be sure, games showed remarkable growth in the 1990s, but they appear to have leveled out recently at a rate below that of music and movies. Note also that "movies" here includes only the US box office take from theaters; throw in DVD sales and everything else the industry does to earn money, and the total movie industry is worth much more. If we look at "media consumption per person" data, we find that the average number of hours spent with video games has also remained quite flat over the same time period. The peak, in fact, was in 2004, when gamers spent 78 hours a year before the glow of a monitor or television.
