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As there are more and more people getting access to gaming devices in the world, making the overall number of gamer increase, the penetration of gaming is also still increasing in western society. The report mentioned on the Venturebeat only focuses on mobile, social and online games and excludes stand-alones. So the total number is even higher.

The study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social, and Mobile Games, claims 135 million people play at least one hour per month compared to 56 million in 2008. Seventeen percent of all gamers have downloaded a title on their smartphones, up from 7 percent in 2008. About 80 percent play free-to-play (F2P) games on the PC or log into Facebook to spend time on the farm or frontier.

Read the full article

I shall be looking into the complete gamer demographic and perhaps distil some meaning out of the huge heap of info. Will share this with you of course!

Quick post on a subject I’m following quite intently; Zynga’s IPO. While I already wrote that I think the social gaming companies are overvalued based on my experience in the gaming market; now some Wall Street analysts sheds his light on it.

A similar social gaming company, Nexon, went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a pre-trading market capitalization of $7 billion, although it closed the day down about 3 percent off its IPO price. The Asian online gaming giant raised $1.2 billion and it made net income of $260.1 million, up 14 percent, on revenue of $853.5 million, up 26.5 percent, for the nine months ended Sept. 30. By contrast, Zynga made a paltry $30.7 million on revenue of $828.9 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30.

Read the full article on VentureBeat

Just a quick statistic of the most recent Major League Gaming event in Raleigh, N.C. that drew more than 130,000 subscribers. We all know I’ve been active in organizing gaming events for quite some years, but it’s numbers like this that would’ve gotten me the investments I needed.

It also puts MLG CEO DiGiavanni in a great mood:

“This year is the final year in the proof-of-concept phase for e-sports. There’s a strong appetite for the flavor of e-sports that we do and the power has shifted to the audience for consumer based products and membership.”

Full article on VentureBeat

According to market researcher DFC Intelligence this growth can be found in the switch from selling games in physical stores to a wide variety of distribution methods; meaning online.

While they have a lot of interesting things to say, their view of the console market was what made me really interested in the article:

At some point, however, competition will force them to introduce new machines. Nintendo had a glorious year for the Wii and handheld DS system in 2008, but it has seen sales decline since that peak. So Nintendo is more motivated to launch a new machine into the market. Nintendo introduced the 3DS earlier this year, but it has been so poorly received that Nintendo slashed the price. the Xbox 360 and the PS 3 may very well live up to their goals of lasting 10 years in the market. But if Microsoft and Sony don’t introduce new consoles in the new few years, they run the risk of turning consumers off.

Read the full article here

Great article by Singularity Hub on Chinese entrepreneur Anshe Chung who is making a fortune by leasing, selling and renting virtual items and real estate on persistent worlds like Second Life and Entropia.

Today you can go to Azure Islands, some of the custom built and designed landscape built by Anshe Chung Studios, and get yourself your own parcel to rent starting at around L$ 821 or $3 USD per week. The really fancy plots go for as much as 13000 L$ a month (about $50), and the prices just keep going up from there[...]

Read the full article here

And I’m not feeling bad about it, I’m making good progress I think towards the number 5 while significantly out-growing number 7. I just hope GOFORUS will stop growing at his insane pace!