A financial expert has tallied up the total value of the videogame industry’s companies, and it’s a whole lot of money.
Paul Heydon of independent banking firm Avista Partners, an investment banker working in the game sector since 1999, has come up with his best guess for the approximate value of the videogame business across the entire world. Speaking at the UK’s Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2010 this week, Heydon puts videogaming at about $105 billion worldwide.
His numbers include the combination of the share values of Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Mobile gaming, retail sales, online gaming, and various other videogame industry sectors. He puts Nintendo at roughly 1/3 of the current industry’s total with around $35 billion. As a comparison, other PC and console companies combined make up a total of $33 billion.
Online game companies have a value of $23 billion worldwide, which isn’t surprising, but something notable is the amount of public online companies in the West versus the East. Of 44 total public online game companies, only 4 are in the West. I’m assuming he’s referring to online-only companies, but financial results analysis is not necessarily my forte.
The rest of the $105 billion is made of up of mobile companies at $8 billion, retail at $3 billion, payment services at $1.3 billion, distribution/accessories with $311 million, and outsourcing at $255 million. These results are far from 100% accurate, but they do give a general idea of the videogame market’s current status, and what’s bringing in money and what’s not.
Heydon says that these numbers show how the videogame industry has changed over the years. Where there was once a direct path from developer to publisher to distributor to retailer to consumer, now are multitudes of other avenues that allow new types of games to exist such as free-to-play MMORPGs and games sold solely through the internet from developer to consumer. Heydon predicts that the value of Mobile gaming will continue to rise, but said that retail and distribution were stagnating. Now that we have a general gauge for this stuff, I’d be interested to see a comparison in 3-5 years.
Source: Avista Partners, via MCV
