All the World's a Game

The latest installment, “Modern Warfare 3”, released on November 8th, set a record of its own with $750m in its first five days. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry, counting DVD sales as well as box-office receipts (see chart below). PwC predicts that video games will be the fastest-growing form of media over the next few years, with sales rising to $82 billion by 2015. Read more at The Economist

Why video games will be an enduring success

Video Games have become the most exciting branch of the entertainment industry. They are a “killer app” that is helping to drive mobile-phone sales, and a key ingredient in the popularity of social-networking sites. Should other media firms worry that games will take over? The numbers can look ominous. In revenue terms, video games already dwarf radio. They are twice the size of the music business and by 2015 will be worth more than the newspaper industry. Just before the recession the games industry was growing by 20-25% a year. Things have slowed down since then, but gaming is still expected to grow by an average of over 8% a year between now and 2015, and is likely to remain the fastest-growing part of the media industry over that period. Read more at The Economist

The moral panic about video games is subsiding

Since gaming has become more mainstream, the proportion of violent games has fallen. According to vgchartz, a website that tracks games sales, the ten bestselling console games of 2010 included just three violent shooters. The rest were inoffensive sports and fitness titles. Still, many games require the player to dispose of great numbers of Nazis, gangsters, aliens and other bad guys. A few games serve up stylised violence for its own sake. And the critics say there is a crucial difference between films, plays or books, where the players are just passive onlookers, and video games, where they are active participants in the simulated slayings. But the evidence is hard to pin down. Read more here.

Smartphones Are Changing Photography

Although global smartphone adoption is still just below 30 percent, smartphone photography is growing in popularity, disrupting traditional camera use in the process. NPD made this trend clear in its Imaging Confluence Study, which found that smartphones accounted for 27 percent of photos shot this year — last year, the number was 17 percent. Accordingly, photos shot with dedicated cameras dropped from 52 to 44 percent. And it’s not just average Joes who think that smartphones make a decent camera. Famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz said that the iPhone is “the snapshot camera of today” and that it’s “accessible and easy” during a November appearance on NBC. And how’s this for a telling statistic: In June, the iPhone 4 surpassed the Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II as the top camera on Flickr. The iPhone has even been used in place of a traditional camera to document war in Afghanistan and to snap memorable photos of the Tour de France. Apple’s decision to choose popular photo-sharing social network Instagram as its 2011 iPhone app of the year is also a nod to the trend and popularity of smartphone photography. An independent U.S. filmographer even shot a full-length movie with a Nokia N8 smartphone. The film, Olive, stars 81-year old Oscar nominated actress Gena Rowlands, and is regarded to be the first feature film ever shot completely with a smartphone. Read more here.