An Overview of the Gaming & Simulation Industry (And Virtual Worlds too!)
Hold onto your seats, we are going to take a ride to review where The Gaming & Simulation Industry has been and what the future holds. Gaming is serious business both economically and socially. Consumers spend $25 billion a year on video games and game components and there are an estimated 800 million gamers worldwide.
The use of gaming and simulation for training and learning purposes is becoming ever more prevalent, over the past 10 years Visual Purple has seen a lot of technological changes and all in a good way. Our training simulation worlds and technology continue to advance rapidly as does most technology. Buy an iPhone today and a newer model comes out tomorrow…
Venture Beat announced last month that Game and Virtual World Fundings reached $936.8 million in 2008.
Nielsen Games’ just released that Second Life was the second top PC game title in the month of March and SL users logged in a average of 760 minutes per week of seat time. Point is virtual worlds now have traction!
According to Virtual Worlds News: “The data is obtained by monitoring Web and application activity from 180,000 homes in the U.S. In online PC games, Second Life is second only to World of Warcraft. The obvious problem many Second Life users would have with the data is that it’s typically considered a virtual world, not a game, but the sheer popularity is impressive.”
New World Notes adds that Second Life has been in the top ten of Nielsen’s ratings before while Massively points out that the virtual world is also topping out over popular social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Second Life saw an average use time of 760 minutes each week, even higher for individuals than the more popular World of Warcraft, though the MMOG saw a significantly higher overall usage.
Serious Gaming is being embraced by many ranging from the United States Military to Fortune 500 Corporations. More and more real world applications have been brought to the table to make them a relevant choice in today’s technologically advanced world. I am extremely excited about the future of serious simulations and virtual worlds.
