Gaming Popularity: Looking at the Numbers

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Although gaming combines technologies that are super advanced and would be considered magic or impossible four or five decades ago, many people take it for granted. since the 1960s the gaming industry and community have been ever growing and creating many careers. In this article we will be talking about the gaming industry and its community. 

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Even though video games are so popular, many might wonder what caused video games’ steady rise in popularity. The rise in popularity is why video games are so popular; this could be caused by video games giving you the ability to be immersed into a fictional world in a way that’s unlike books and movies.  Another reason why video games are so popular would be because video games are played on computers and consoles which are easily accessible—most households have at least one device that can run a game. Following the last statement, the devices used to play video games are small and mobile, allowing you to play them anywhere. Lastly it could be up to the fact that there is such a wide variety of video games. The gaming community is really big and so is the developing gaming community; there are estimated to be about 1,181,019 video games out there and many more on the way.  

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Although the movie industry is really big and has been around for a long time, gaming might just be in the lead. Movies have been around since 1895; so, after all this time, movies have been integrated into our society and has been the top of the entertainment industry. Until now movies haven’t really had much contest. Well, as it turns out, in 1982, the video game industry surpassed both Hollywood and pop music combined in regards to profits, and video games are still rising in popularity as computers become more and more affordable. In 2019, movies earned $101 billion USD which is a lot but doesn’t reach video games’ $120.1 billion USD.  

Since gaming is a large international industry, there have got to be countries on top of this competitive industry.  Worldwide there were  909 million gamers in 2020. The top two contributing to this number were China and America; China with 665 million gamers and America with 244 million. China and America being on top could be because of the fact that their citizens have easy access to the computer, the internet, and video games. Another factor could be their population size. 

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Even though computers took many years to make them this powerful, many people don’t realize how special they are. Now that the technology needed to run video games has gotten smaller, they have become more popular and, as such, easier to waste time with. Since video games are still on the rise in popularity, it is quite possible that video games will be heavily integrated into the future of our society.   

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