In the Social Gaming context, 2011 will be remembered as the year when Google launched Google+, Facebook credits was launched after the beta stage and the social network game developer Zynga filed for its IPO. With its IPO, a first in the social gaming arena, Zynga expects to raise upto $2 billion to fund its global expansion. Meanwhile developers are still navigating through the Facebook credits model. At the same time Google is pulling out all stops in its effort to launch a serious competition to Facebook as a social gaming platform in North America since the demise of MySpace. In this blog we will take a look at some statistics pertaining to the social gaming industry, browse through Facebook Credits and speculate on the future of social games.
The recent statistics and trends suggest that the social gaming industry is on an exponential growth curve. The US social gaming market is expected to blow past $5.5 billion in 2015.
Source: Morgan Stanley
The Nomura Research Institute says that Japan’s social gaming market will likely be worth 393.5 billion yen (US$5.1 billion) in fiscal 2016, roughly doubling in size when compared with 2011.
Source: Morgan Stanley
In a recently released report Deutsche Bank predicted that China’s social network gaming revenues will double by 2011, reaching $3.5 billion. According to a study done by business and consulting firm Pearl Research, the online games market in China was expected to cross $8 billion by 2014. Although the Chinese gaming market experienced a slow growth initially in 2010, but by the end of the year it had rebounded to 25 percent overall growth, reaching $5 billion in sales. The bright outlook for Chinese gaming is bolstered by the fact that country’s top online game companies experienced another banner year of growth in 2010, led by gaming colossus Tencent, which saw revenue push $1.4 billion. Tencent was followed by Netease at $749 million, Shanda Games at $680 million, Perfect World at $374 million, and Changyou with $327 million. In February 2012, Electronic Arts (EA) announced that the popular franchise The Sims will move into China’s leading social network, Tencent Open Platform.
In India, Social Gaming is a relatively new phenomenon but one which has seen increasing popularity amongst Indians. As per a report by Ficci and KPMG, the social gaming market in India was Rs 240 crore in 2010 and expected to touch Rs 1430 crore by 2014. According to Ashish Khoria, Country Manager of MOL India, a leading payment service providers for online games, over 500mn people worldwide play social games and in India alone, more than 10 million or over 50 per cent of India's Facebook users play social games. Recently, online gaming company Ibibo’s CEO Ashish Kashyap announced that they aimed to increase their market share in the country’s social gaming space to 50 percent in the next two years, from 30-35 percent at present. Given the above facts, it is quite evident that social network gaming is going to be one of the major revenue-generating and profit making businesses.
-Rahul Mukherjee
MDI, 2011-13
1 comment:
It is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. It is too big – terabytes or pentabytes, moves too fast, or doesn’t fit the strictures of your database architectures. The data is increasing at exponential pace – both structured and unstructured, and the technology is increasing according to Moore`s law which is helping the companies to store and process such huge amount of data.
vumoo
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