In 1972 when the Odyssey games console by Magnavox was released on to the market, many industry experts predicted that home gaming would never take off. The family home was seen as the domain of the board game back then with video gaming confined to the shining, flashing lights of arcade halls.
Whilst the Odyssey was not a roaring commercial success it was an epochal release in that it showed what was capable. Since then, games consoles have come on leaps and bounds with the gaming industry itself. The early 2000s saw the first integrations of the internet with games, with multiplayer games and gamers sharing these d2r builds and other guides over the net.
In this article, we cast our minds back 10 years rather than 50 years to analyse some of the biggest shifts in the gaming industry and how they have changed the way we game today.
Gambling Incorporation
50 years ago the idea that gambling would be incorporated under the term ‘gaming’ would have been absurd. In fact, even 20 years ago the idea would have struggled to have caught on.
Nowadays though gambling is readily included in the same category as gaming which is thanks to the rise of the online gambling industry. Since the turn of the millennium online gambling has become more and more prevalent with each passing year.
Its grand breakthrough came in the early years of the smartphone though when poker, blackjack and roulette fans began accessing top-level online casinos on their mobile devices. These top-level casino sites would also offer bonuses and promotions to players to encourage more gamers to try out online casino games.
Gambling has become so synonymous with gaming in recent years that the lines have been further blurred by a number of crossovers.
Free to Play Gaming
Video games have always cost a pretty penny to develop. There are graphic designers, coders, actors, marketing experts and a great many more to pay. Traditionally developers have recouped this outlay with fairly high sales prices.
Over the course of the past decade however, this economic model has been smashed by the emergence of free to play games. The best example of which comes in the form of Fortnite, the cartoon-like Battle Royale game that took the world by storm in 2017.
Rather than making their money from physical copy sales, these titles make their money from in-game microtransactions. Players spend real money to obtain tokens or coins which can be exchanged for things such as weapon blueprints, player skins and emotes. It’s an economic model that is working. In 2020 Fortnite generated $5.1 billion in revenue whilst competitor Warzone was reportedly making $5 million a day at the height of its popularity in 2020.