The Games Industry: Past, Present and Future
This section is split into three parts:
Pre 1994: details the growth of the industry to the advent of the 32 bit era.
1994 to 2000 : details developments and trends during the PlayStation era
2001 and Beyond: details the likely development of the industry over the next few years
Introduction
The games industry, as it stands today, consists of two major sectors: the video games market
and the computer games market. Until the early 90's, both markets evolved in much the same
way, following a boom/bust cycle dictated by the shelf lives of the individual games hardware
standards of the time. Since then, the games market, overall, has begun to stabilise, partly the
result of a strong and growing computer games market dominated by a single hardware
standard, the PC, that crucially, is open and, as a result, ever evolving. The video games
market, on the other hand, has always been dominated by proprietary standards, currently:
Sony's Playstation 2, Nintendo's Game Cube and Microsoft's Xbox. The closed nature of these
video game standards, coupled with the reluctance of the standard owners to release major
hardware upgrades (to prevent obsolescence) has and will continue, for the foreseeable future,
to result in their limited shelf lives and the continued cyclicality of the market.
Indeed the maturing of the market over the last decade has resulted in a more uniform pattern
of growth emerging, based around 6 year market cycles. A pattern of 4 years of growth
followed by a 2 year transition period has become something of a standard within the industry.
The industry will enter the first of what is expected to be 4 years of growth in 2002-2001.
