It’s Not Only Geeks Gone Mad for Games . . .
Friday, February 29th, 2008Online gaming is on the rise. From your kid brother to your to your Mom to your Grandpa Joe, everyone is catching on to the casual gaming rave.
As a 30-year old female, I never thought I would enjoy online gaming, however just like the URL, addictinggames.com reveals, casual games can be addicting and a great way to distract one-self on a rainy day, during work or if you’re just plain ol’ bored.
Just last week San Francisco was inundated with gaming geeks at the Gaming Developers Conference (GDC). Thousands of people loitered around the Moscone Center for the five-day conference to listen to the Microsoft keynote, play around with the Xbox Live community arcade and attend the Blogger’s breakfast.
Following the GDC, ClickZ released an article with some interesting statistics on the online gaming industry, highlighting that the online gaming market will experience a nearly four-fold revenue increase by 2008. In-Stat/MDR predicts that the total online gaming industy will grow from just over a billion in 2003 to nearly $4 billion by the end of 2008.
With revenues exploding by advertising integration and millions of new players, if techies are smart they will start pulling themselves away from other online applications and redundant site developments to focus on creating the next big virtual, viral game.
A recent NPD Group research report noted that two-thirds of the surveyed 13 to 44-year-olds are using their PC or Mac instead of consoles and online gamers spent more time playing PC games online than offline (60 percent compared to 40 percent).
