The video game sector is immensely large. In fact, it is larger than the movie and music industries combined, and it is only growing. Though it doesn't get the same attention that the movie and music industry does, there are over two billion gamers across the world. That is 26% of the world's population.
The video game boom caused by Space Invaders saw a huge number of new companies and consoles pop up, resulting in a period of market saturation. Too many gaming consoles, and too few interesting, engaging new games to play on them, eventually led to the 1983 North American video games crash, which saw huge losses, and truckloads of unpopular, poor-quality titles buried in the desert just to get rid of them. The gaming industry was in need of a change.
The real revolution in gaming came when LAN networks, and later the Internet, opened up multiplayer gaming. Multiplayer gaming took the gaming community to a new level because it allowed fans to compete and interact from different computers, which improved the social aspect of gaming. This key step set the stage for the large-scale interactive gaming that modern gamers currently enjoy. On April 30, 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain, but it would be years before the Internet was powerful enough to accommodate gaming as we know it today.
Since the early 2000s, Internet capabilities have exploded and computer processor technology has improved at such a fast rate that every new batch of games, graphics and consoles seems to blow the previous generation out of the water. The cost of technology, servers and the Internet has dropped so far that Internet at lightning speeds is now accessible and commonplace, and 3.2 billion people across the globe have access to the Internet. According to the ESA Computer and video games industry report for 2015, at least 1.5 billion people with Internet access play video games.
Online storefronts such as Xbox Live Marketplace and the Wii Shop Channel have totally changed the way people buy games, update software and communicate and interact with other gamers, and networking services like Sony’s PSN have helped online multiplayer gaming reach unbelievable new heights.
This dashboard can visually track all sales, both by year and by region and platform. Also, on a separate sheet there is a detail of each platform and each genre of games, with the top games.
