Video games have become the leading form of entertainment, growing from a $1.5 Billion market in 1982 to over $100 Billion in 2014. Gartner is predicting that the video game market will grow another 11% in 2015. In 2013 people spent 2.2 Billion hours watching e-Sports and that number is projected to grow to 6.6 Billion hours in 2018.
Some of the biggest games such as League of Legends and DOTA (Defense of the Ages) have 70 and 8 million active users respectively. Additionally these games are generating high revenues with League of Legends generating $624 million from micro transactions. In comparison, Box who went public today with a market cap of about $3 Billion only generates $125 in revenues. This year's League of Legends championship was watched by 32 million people, granted 111 million watch the Super Bowl every year but the NFL spends a lot more money on marketing.
With all these captive users and audiences one would expect billions of dollars being spent to advertise during these events and for product placement within games. That, however, is shockingly untrue. In fact the gaming industry is expected to only generate $300 million in advertising revenues by 2018.
One possible explanation is that eSports is still a young industry with Starcraft really being the grandfather of the industry. Broadband and YouTube is really what enabled for these communities to move out of their mother's basements and into the mainstream. That has only happened in the last decade. As a result companies haven't figured out how to exactly monetize advertisement spend in the media channel. One thing is for sure though, as gaming becomes more mainstream the advertising dollars will follow.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2614915
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_industry
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/03/a-marketers-dream-league-of-legends-dota-2-help-e-sports-rack-up-2-4-billion-viewer-hours-in-2013/
http://fortune.com/2014/07/24/esports-sponsors/
http://www.dailydot.com/esports/league-legends-lcs-grand-final-32-million/
No comments:
Post a Comment