Games are big business

Using data from intelligence firm Pelham Smithers, Visual Capitalist showed how much gambling companies have made in the US since 1970. And the numbers are really impressive. The results of the entire research are quite clearly shown in the cover image (you can see it enlarged in the gallery at the end of this article), and if you are interested in more detailed information, you can find it at this address. And what do they say?

Commercially, it all started in the 1970s with arcade games in special casinos. There were more or less of these in our country, as it was possible to play slot machines here and there in some taverns and fairgrounds that were quite popular at the time, while in the USA and some other countries, "arcades" were extremely popular and the mularia left quite a lot of money in them. They experienced their peak in 1982, when 27 billion dollars were turned over in the USA with arcade games.

In the 1970s, the first gaming consoles began to appear, which users could connect to their home television. Their abilities were significantly more limited than "arcades", so they trailed behind them in terms of revenue for many years, but with the advent of more powerful processors and graphic interfaces, they also flourished and experienced their peak in 2018 and 2021, when they earned 33 billion dollars each, and in 2022 they represented about 17 percent of the market.

Arcade games experienced both their peak and their biggest decline in the 1980s. The reason is, of course, the appearance of such and other personal computers (Spectrum, Commodore, Atari, PC...), which slowly but surely began to eat away the market share of arcades, and in the early nineties, when we witnessed the rapid development of graphics cards, it was clear that slot machines were a thing of the past. Graphics cards also led to the decline of the aforementioned Spectrums, Commodores, Ataris and others, so that now by the term personal computer we more or less mean what now runs Windows, MacOS and Linux. Despite the dilution of competition, the gaming industry is expected to generate over $45 billion in revenue in the US in 2022, accounting for a quarter of the entire gaming industry.

The mentioned numbers, especially if we know that they apply only to the USA, are really quite impressive. But they can hide from the progress made by mobile games, or games that users play on mobile devices such as phones and tablets. When the first mobile phones appeared, only a few games could be played on them, and even those were extremely "basic". Until smartphones appeared in 2007, first iPhones, and a little later Androids. At that time, the rapid rise of the development and use of mobile games began, which in the record year 2020 (Covid) generated a good 105 billion dollars in turnover in the US alone, which is more than games for personal computers and consoles combined.

Source: Visual Capitalist

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