10 Interesting 2018 Video Game Industry Statistics, Trends & Data

Published in

The Startup

6 min readSep 29, 2018

We all know how the vibrant gaming industry keeps us yearning for its dose of data, trends, and statistics.

Andrew Yurenja, who frequently creates games and teaches other people his skills, says that “the video gaming industry has seen a lot of changes over the past few years as the number of female gamers took a nosedive and social players embarked on an upward trend.”

And, we can’t wait to know what’s interesting in the video gaming industry in 2018, right?

Here are some statistics that could help you understand whether PUBG is still loved or whether eSports has boosted its viewership amid its popularity gain.

So, let’s take a peek into the major happenings of the video gaming industry trends in 2018.

1. For Which Platforms Were Game Developers Developing Games?

The following statistics were obtained from the 2018 Games Developers’ Conference.

For PC and Mac: 53%
For Smartphones and Tablets: 38%
For PS4/PRO: 27%
For VR Headsets: 24%
For Xbox one/ Scorpio: 22%
For Web Browse: 13%
For Linux: 7%
For AR Headsets: 5%
For Apple TV: 4%
For Nintendo Switch: 3%

2. Who Is Playing? The Gamers Overview

In the U.S. alone, 64% of the general population are gamers (Nielsen, 2017)
The average age of male gamers is 33 (Entertainment Software Association, 2017)
The average age of female gamers is 37 (Entertainment Software Association, 2017
Of the male gamers, 14.1% cite competition as their motivation to play while 11.9% play for destruction (Quantic Foundry, 2018)
14.5% of female gamers are motivated to play because of the game’s design while 16.2% play for fantasy (Quantic Foundry, 2018)
Consumer gaming content expenditure takes up an estimated 80% of the industry’s revenues in the U.S. (Entertainment Software Association, 2017)
Gaming hardware accounts for about 12% of consumer spending while only 7% is attributed to gaming accessories in the U.S. (Entertainment Software Association, 2017)

3. Which Games Are Popular With Players?

The most popular core PC game around the world is League of Legends (Newzoo, 2018)
In China, PUBG is a favorite with 52% of core PC gamers (Newzoo, 2018)
In France, 29% of core PC gaming enthusiasts choose to play Fortnite (Newzoo, 2018)
As of January 2018, 6.33 million units of World of Warcraft PC Game had been sold, making it the second best seller worldwide (VGChartz, 2018)
The third-placed best-selling PC game as of January 2018 was Diablo III, having sold 5.23 million units (VGChartz, 2018)
As at March 2018, the game with the most number of fans totaling 65.35 million was the Texas Holdem Poker (Fan Page List, 2018)
A 24.37 million fan base was estimated for call of Duty Black Ops and Modern Warfare as of March 2018 (Fan Page List, 2018)
The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Odyssey: Breath of Wild was ranked as 2017’s best games and given a Metacritic score of 97/100 (MetaCritic, 2017)
Critics recognized The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina as the best game ever with a Metacritic score of 99/100 (MetaCritic, 2017)

4. Mobile Gaming

Revenue generated from mobile gaming applications is likely to rise by 44% in 2020, from $41.5 billion in 2016 (VentureBeat, 2016)
As of April 2017, the U.S was ranked first place for mobile game session shares which accounted for 20%, with India taking the second place at 13% of the shares (Techcrunch, 2017)
Revenues from Smartphone gaming hit 16.5 billion euros in 2017 and expectations are that it will grow by 26.3% come 2021 (IDATE DigiWorld, 2017)
Tablet gaming generated revenues amounting to 6 billion euros and the figure is expected to increase by 42.3% come 2021 (IDATE DigiWorld, 2017)
On the iOS Apps and games, Netflix tops the list with a record of the most downloads and revenues in the U.S. (Newzoo, 2018)
The second-placed for the iOS Apps and games with most revenues and downloads is Pandora Music (Newzoo, 2018)
The third-placed is YouTube on the list of iOS Apps and games with most downloads and revenues (Newzoo, 2018)

5. Are Children Fond of Mobile Gaming?

Premium children’s games generated 69% of the revenue earned by the mobile gaming industry from upfront purchases in the United States alone (SuperData Research, 2015)
From in-app purchases, the premium children’s games generated 30% of revenue for the mobile gaming industry (SuperData Research, 2015)
60% of children in the United States prefer playing games on a console (NPD Group, 2015)
In the United States, 63% of children access mobile devices which they use to play games (NPD Group, 2015)

6. Online Gaming

42% of gamers in the United States don’t have any subscription to gaming platforms and services (Statista, 2017)
PlayStation Plus has a subscription of an estimated 39% of gamers in the United States (Statista, 2017)
PlayStation Plus had a subscription of 10.8 million members in January 2015 (Gamasutra, 2017)
In 2018, subscriptions to PlayStation Plus is projected to increase by 22.8%, a growth of 26.4 million subscribers from those in March 2017 (Gamasutra, 2017)
Xbox Live Gold has a subscription of an estimated 33% of gamers in the United States (Statista, 2017)
In the first quarter of 2016, Microsoft’s Xbox Live attracted 39 million users (Microsoft, 2018)
The third quarter of 2018 is projected to experience a 33% rise in the number of active monthly users on Xbox Live from the first quarter of 2016 (Microsoft, 2018)
In April 2017, Steam experienced a high number of concurrent users at 11.83 million during peak time (Steam; IGN, 2018)
In January 2018, the number of simultaneous users on the Steam platform at peak time grew by 4%, an increase from the 17.68 million users realized in November 2017 (Steam; IGN, 2018)

7. Gaming Video Content

In the second quarter of 2017, Twitch had 15,000 users streaming simultaneously compared to YouTube Gaming Live which had only 9,300 users within the same period (Streamlabs, 2018)
As of December 2016, PayPal was used to process 93% of tips to Twitch streamers (Streamlabs, 2018)
Tipping instances increased by 20% from those recorded in 2016 to 101 million in 2017 (Techcrunch, 2018)

8. ESports

The leading sports game in 2017 worldwide that attracted the most prize pool of $38 million was DOTA 2 (Esports-betting.pro, 2018)
In 2017, the eSports market generated a total of $655 million in market revenue (Esportsbets.com, 2018)
Asia commanded the biggest share of the global eSports market revenue in 2017, accounting for 36% of the shares (Esportsbets.com, 2017)

9. Video Game Monetization

30% of gamers in the United States don’t subscribe to any paid games on their devices (Statista, 2017)
20% of gamers in the United States say they pre-order video games on a regular basis (Statista, 2017)
56% of U.S gamers purchase video games from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store (Statista, 2017)
In 2017, PayPal was the top preferred payment method for 40.1% of console gamers (SuperData Research, 2017)

10. Console Gaming

In 2017, the web-based global microtransaction console market took up 10.5% of the industry’s worth (Xania News, 2016)
The digital worldwide console games market took up about 23.2% of the industry’s worth in 2017 (Xania News, 2016)
The physical console games market took up most of the shares, covering 66.3% of the industry’s global worth in 2017 (Xania News, 2016)

Conclusion

From the above statistics, data, and trends it’s evident that the video game industry is experiencing remarkable growth.

And, now is the best time to learn game development skills and cut a slice of the lucrative industry.

Or, why should you be left behind?

Do you know of any other exciting gaming industry trend 2018?

Please let us know in the comment section below.