About Games Industry

PC’s And Consoles

There are two primary segments to the games industry and more specifically to game development; games for PCs both on and offline and games for dedicated consoles; Microsoft’s Xbox360, Sony’s PS3, Nintendos Wii. It is estimated that the PC market accounts for 35% of total market sales and consoles 65%.

Games for the PC

PC games have closely followed the spread of PCs into the home. The installed base of PCs has grown significantly and has been further fuelled by the massive growth of broadband internet connectivity and the ability to download and play games online. This has had very positive implications for some of the big online games with World of Warcraft having many millions of online subscribers. The attractiveness of the web to games companies is illustrated by the fact that nearly all publishers have online games projects either in the market or in development.

Games for the Console

The Console games market also continues to expand rapidly, whilst the console market is undoubtedly very appealing to developers, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, have total control over the approval of new titles and the way in which they are developed, this tends to make console development more specialist with the teams working on these titles being bigger and more heavily resourced.

The Games publishers

The largest publishers still hail from the US, France and Japan. The dominance of the large publishers such as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo is built on the success of their hardware platforms and the great titles they have published for their own platform. US publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision can rely on the quality of their games and their strong distribution channels The European Publisher presence is represented by Atari, Ubi Soft the the UK offices of EA and 2K Games all of whom publish world renowned multiplatform games. Although the UK publisher presence is small when compared to the rest of the world there has always been an extremely strong games development community. Of all games published across the world, nearly 30% emanate from UK development teams, moreover 1 in 4 world-wide hit titles are from the UK.

Game Developers

Games developers are the creative element of the games industry there are both independent developers (teams not owned by a publishers) and publisher owned developers, both types team are where the creative process of taking a game design from a paper concept to a completed graphically intense computer game experience is carried out. Most developers have between 1 and 3 teams all working on games development projects for varying kinds of platforms; handheld devices, consoles PC and even mobile-phone games!