Monday 16 May 2011

Current Trends - Social Gaming

As the fast growth top 10 shows, online gaming is becoming more popular. For 2009, the market share of online games is estimated at one sixth of the total video game market. This share is rising quickly, as are the companies in this field. It took the most successful companies only a few years to make hundreds of millions USD. Chinese Shanda Interactive is the largest pure-play online gaming company with sales of over US$ 700 million. US based Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, made an estimated $270 million in 2009. Traditional game makers are aware of the online goldmine, and are publishing their own online titles.

Like elsewhere in the software industry, the motto in the gaming industry is: acquire or be acquired, resulting in a continuous flow of company transactions:
- Playfish, a successful European maker of social network games, was taken over by Electronic Arts in 2009.
- Koei and Tecmo merged in 2009. Revenues rose, but not enough to move up the ranking.
- Square Enix got into the top 10 after acquiring Eidos in April 2009


Heres a really good article I ound on the subject here.
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7022-social-gaming-trends-for-2011

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