The Biggest Trends in Social Gaming
The popularity of social gaming has exploded in recent years thanks to the growth of mobile devices. With cross-platform compatibility, playing with friends from around the world has become more convenient than ever.
Game market research firm Newzoo recently put together a report highlighting the current trends in social gaming and where they’re headed. Currently, players around the world spend 1 billion hours each day playing games (more than 5x the amount they spend on YouTube or Facebook) - and looking ahead, mobile gaming is expected to generate more than $100B by 2017.
RPG’s, MMO’s and Strategy/Puzzle games are among the top genres, but trends are showing that these definitions are being blended into mash-up MMO-RPG-Puzzle games (i.e. Puzzle Quest) to increase engagement and cater to a wider audience of players.
You can read more about the report on Inside Social Games here, as they discuss other social gaming trends including micro transactions, special events and cross platform reach.
Big Data in the Game Industry
Big data and analytics have become one of the most popular buzzwords and trends among the IT and technology industry in recent years, with the advancement of technology. Any business is now able to collect massive amounts of data, store it on a server, and analyze it with a variety of analysis platforms to get insight into the future.
By 2015, the Big data market size is predicted to be worth $220B and will create over 4.4M IT jobs, globally - but where does the future of Big data lie in the gaming industry? Nils Phil recently wrote an article on Gamasutra, listing his thoughts on the future of video game Big data. You can read it here.
The Future of Video Game Investment
Investment within the last couple of years has boomed in the games industry with recent IPOs from King and Zynga, and purchases like Facebook’s $2B Oculus VR acquisition. Since video games are becoming more relevant for investors, it’s important to know about the hottest trends and strategies.
VentureBeat recently attended the Videogame Economics Forum in Angoulême, France to chat with a few game investors and industry leaders.
When asked about current trends, Marc Jackson, CEO and Founder of Seahorn Capital Group in LA said “One of the key trends that’s affecting the games industry, especially on the digital side, is data analytics. We’re only at the tip of the iceberg, the very beginning of seeing how powerful analytics can get. Even the biggest players – Google and Facebook and so on – haven’t found out what they can do with that special mix between humans and data and the way they’re interacting with new devices.”
You can read the full article with insight here on VentureBeat. Thanks for reading this weeks Ninja news roundup!
