Trends shaping up gaming industry of 2017

Increasing rate of adoption of smartphones and tablets has transformed the model of the gaming industry. A study says, annual sales rate of smartphone will reach units of 1.57 billion worldwide and according to Gartner the growth of the mobile game market will grasp the hike of 19%. Gartner also adds, “Games for smartphones and tablets will gross over $23 billion (27.8% of the world’s mobile soft sales) this year.”

Mobile Gaming Industry Trends:

We have been noticing the evolution of the mobile app ecosystem in the last few years. Besides, top game developers are developing new app strategies and new standards, messaging services and social networks are becoming important platforms for game development. For example, in 2013, Kakao Talk has received $203 million through an in-app game.

On the other hand, 2016 has witnessed the rise of freemium games as records say, free games from iOS and Android have been downloaded over 211 billion times and successful top game app developers like Supercell have earned millions just through in-app purchases, upgrades, and advertising. Indie developers have also entered the gaming market and are developing engaging games. Apparently, there are few trends that are reshaping the gaming market of 2017.

Adoption rate of Virtual Reality headsets

Virtual Reality has become the mainstream in recent days. Every big giant company is adopting the practice of VR. Besides the launch of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, we have seen the recent launch of PlayStation VR from Sony. Not only that, companies from Samsung to Google, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon, Nokia, and Siemens all are working on in this Virtual Reality technology. VR is making inroads into industries like real estate, automobile, and education which are beyond gaming. There are many companies developing advanced applications and games like Google’s Alphabet, Virtuix, GoPro, and Amberella. Recently Apple has also announced that they working on a VR based project.

According to Tractica research, “More than 200 million consumer Virtual Reality head-mounted displays (HMDs) will be sold worldwide by 2020. The consumer Virtual Reality hardware and content revenue will increase from $108.8 million to $21.8 billion worldwide by 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 142%.”

Revolution of business model

The growing popularity of adopting games into businesses has revamped the structure of business. Implementing gaming elements into non-gaming elements boosts to increase the engagement of users or players or participants. This structure has made a drastic change in the industries. Gamification helps businesses to delete the long waiting marketing process, training techniques. With gamification mechanisms like badges, leaderboards, rewards, scores, and point gamification has changed the employee and customer engagement model.