Despite the different factors that can influence the stock market and the economy, the gaming industry continues to go from strength to strength. 2021 saw several of the biggest and most influential publishing houses make record amounts of profit. This wasn’t a fluke or an anomaly either; these companies have been posting bigger and bigger bottom lines over the last few years.
This growth has been driven by several different factors. The industry has been able to attract more and more people to begin playing games for the first time by reaching out to previously underserved demographics. In addition to that, it’s managed to get existing players to spend more and decrease its production costs.
All of this has been achieved by introducing a string of innovations that have changed the types of games people play, how and where they play them, and even how they pay for them. As a result, games of all kinds look very different to how they did just a decade or two ago.
Casual Games
In the 1990s and early 2000s, almost all games available for PC and consoles were titles that would take tens or even hundreds of hours to complete. If you were going to play them, you’d usually need to commit to a lengthy gaming session.
Today, the fastest-growing types of games are “casual” and “hyper-casual”. These are titles much shorter and can be played for just a few minutes at a time, allowing players to dip in and out of them whenever they have time. They’re often also infinitely repeatable, so there is no end target where the player can say that they have “completed” the game, therefore extending the life of the title.
These casual games are popular with all age groups and genders, but they have appealed to older and female players far more than some more traditional video games.
Novel Takes on Traditional Titles
Some games come in and out of fashion. In the 1980s, side-scrolling platformers were all the rage, while in the 1990s, one-on-one fighting titles were the flavour of the day. Today, the genre of choice is the battle royale, but that will likely change in the years to come.
Throughout this whole time though, many traditional games like blackjack and baccarat have remained in demand throughout. This is partly due to the timeless charm that these games have and also thanks to the new innovative variants that add new dynamics and create different challenges for players to tackle.
One of these is 21+3 blackjack, which takes elements of three-card brag and introduces it as a side bet to a standard game of blackjack. This means that as well as trying to make a standard hand of 21, you can make additional wagers to make poker hands with your first two cards and the dealer’s hole card.
Other examples include a version of roulette that uses two balls and the option to play blackjack with multiple hands at the same time.
Microtransactions
Microtransactions have been a huge boon to the bottom lines of many gaming companies across the industry. They’ve provided a way for them to continue to extract value from their products long after they were first released.
This is in contrast to the traditional monetisation model which saw gamers pay one big fee upfront to get access to all the content.
Microtransactions provide developers with a way to introduce additional elements to their games over time. For example, games like Call of Duty: Mobile get new maps and game modes added at several points throughout the year, while new in-game items like character and weapon skins are introduced every few weeks.
These microtransactions are so successful that publishing companies like Take-Two Interactive now make more of their income from microtransactions than they do upfront purchases.
On top of being able to make more money from their games, this new model also lowers development costs as smaller teams can continue to create the ongoing content than would be necessary for developing a completely new title.
