The Business Of Video Games: Market Share For Gaming Platforms in 2019 [Infographic]

Kevin Anderton

Recently, a company called NewZoo released a Global Games Market Report. Within that report were many predictions for the upcoming year and beyond. I had a chance to read over it the other day and I am going to be talking about some of the highlights. Primarily I will be talking about the market shares of different gaming platforms like mobile devices and consoles and what we can expect in the coming years according to Newzoo.
A market research company

First a little about Newzoo so we know where this information is coming from. This company creates market forecasts for the gaming industry which includes games, esports, mobile devices and more. They have 11 years of experience and their forecasts are fueled by data from the market itself. Their data is harvested by tracking billions of devices, millions of app users, epsorting events, and more. Their consumer research is conducted in 30 different countries and by interviewing 70,000 individual consumers each year. All that information gets plugged into marketing models and analysis to create forecasts for the future.

All of that seems pretty credible to me but let's look at the forecasts and then you can decide for yourself if you think Newzoo is on the ball or not.
Market share for gaming platforms in 2019

Last year the gaming market generated somewhere around $138.7 billion in revenue. The prediction from Newzoo is that in 2019 it will increase by about 9.6% to generate 152.1 billion. The video game industry grew about 10% in 2018 so to say that it will grow a similar amount seems to make sense.

If we break that prediction down by platform the information gets fairly interesting. The largest segment, 36%, will be generated by smartphone games. Which is not too surprising. You can’t walk across the street without running into someone playing Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, or something like that. On top of that, the largest segment of the market logically goes to the device that most people have access to and it seems like everyone has a smartphone. The smallest segment of the market, 2%, will go to Browser PC Games. These are games like Runescape and Quake Live that you can play through your PC’s browser instead of downloading them. Honestly, this is a category that I forgot existed. I used to play games like this all the time but I haven’t found a game that held my interest in a long time. The prediction is that browser-based games will continue to lose market share in 2019 and over the next few years.

The total break down of the market in 2019 has console games accounting for 32% of the revenue and will actually grow faster than smartphone games in the coming years. Regardless of this increased growth console games will not overtake smartphone games any time soon.