Back when videos game was just some big old arcade machine, then personal computer appeared, brought along with it some of the most popular game titles of all time such as Half-Life, Starcraft, Age Of Empire,... The gaming industry slowly gained its recognition from the world and even outgrew Hollywood in the entertainment sector, with a $140 billion revenue in the record.
People started to see through the differences and accepted gaming a competitive sport. Competition events like DreamHack or ESL were live streamed with hundreds of thousands of online and offline viewer. Online gaming and smartphones mainly contributed to the constant growth of this industry.
The online gaming industry
Cyber cafes were the holy place of every gamer in 20 years back. That was the only place where players can meet and play together through the LAN network. It started out as small, niche communities and things began to get bigger with the born of the internet. People then had a way to connect and play with people from all around the world. Online gaming platforms such as Steam, Battle.net and Origin was the bridge that brings players together, slashed out the need for physical game stores, providing instant access to a game.
Multiplayer online games also started to emerge with the arrive of MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game). They use different methodologies like recording player's statistics, giving progression loot and track record, introducing more frequent update and patches. This keeps players from leaving the game and encourages people to spend to advance faster than other people.
Free-to-play is another part of the online gaming business. A lot of companies like this model especially the small one since it attracts more player to try their game. The game itself is free, but there will be lots of in-game microtransactions that give players special cosmetics or advantages over free-to-play players. In-game purchases are seen in a lot of free-to-play game across all gaming platform, and they are the main source of income and revenue in the gaming industry.
Smartphone devices
Smartphones were invented with the idea of a compact device that can provide everything to the users, including entertainment. In order to obtain a sufficient computer for gaming, you will need roughly Rs 50000, while a good smartphone only cost Rs 20000 on top of its mobility and convenience.
Mobile data is more advanced and cheaper than a few years ago, make it viable for online gaming on mobile. Smartphone user is growing faster and faster every day along with the development of mobile games.
PUBG Mobile is now one of the most played games on the mobile platform, leading the Battle Royale genre to the smartphones market. PUBG Mobile even surpass Fornite in mobile platform with 200 million users in total with 30 million active users.
One possibility in the future is that cloud gaming will take over all of the other platforms. Cloud gaming can be understood as playing games on another computer using your computer via the internet. This way, gamers don't have to worry about the hardware limitation of their own, they can play any game title as long as they have an internet connection. All the big company like Google, Microsoft, Nvidia are investing billions dollar worth of money to make this platform come in play as soon as possible come true.