There it is.
Because it allowed people to interact with what was on their screen.
It, by today's standards of course, was unbelievably primitive.
And, it's hard to imagine how anyone would get interested in what
you see behind me on the screen there, but Pong, for the first time,
gave people the power to interact with a digital game at home.
And, since then, the video game industry has grown and grown.
And now, as I said, it's 40 years old.
It is both substantial as a business phenomenon,
pervasive in the experience of, especially the younger
generation of people, particularly in the West but,
in many other parts of the world as well.
And, video games have developed a very sophisticated language
of how to express themselves, and entertain and engage people.
Here's one example just to show what I'm talking about here.
This is CityVille, one of the casual social games on Facebook made by Zynga.
And, CityVille, as you can see is, clearly
a game and a fairly graphically simple game, at
least compared to some of the rich 3D immersive
games that we have on consoles and PCs today.
Here's the interesting thing about CityVille.
CityVille was launched by Zynga in 2011.
In 41 days, it hit a hundred million registered users.
Six weeks, zero, to a hundred million registered users.
An extraordinary rate of growth and, it's not limited to just
this one game or this one company, this is a huge phenomenon.
So here is some statistics to capture just how big the video game industry is today.
The industry, depending on who's numbers you take, is somewhere on
the order of 60 to 80 billion dollars a year in revenues.
Double the revenues of Hollywood from box office sales of films.
Films make money from other mechanisms as
well, including tie-ins with games, but if you're
talking abour box office revenues, games are already
much bigger and they're growing faster than Hollywood.
The second is that games are evolving to
the point where online games, games played or
distributed online as opposed as to on consoles
like the Playstation and Xbox and Nintendo Wii.
Or, downloaded in a box and loaded on a PC,
the online games are growing faster and are poised to
become the biggest segment of the games marketplace, and interestingly,
already the biggest component of the online games marketplace is China.
So it's not just an American or a Western phenomenon.
The third is that games are becoming the foundation for other industries.
Virtual goods, I will talk about later in the class,
but these are things that you can buy within the game.
Think about a brand new sword for a player in a massively multiplayer online game.
Or, some additional seeds and other equipment that you might use in a Zynga
game like Farmville, things that you pay real money for that appear in the
game, this economy around virtual goods is
already many billions of dollars, 7.3 billion
globally and 2 billion in the U.S.,
according to the latest statistics I could find.
A very substantial market which is not games themselves, but
something built on top of the great success of games.
And, finally, the other great evolution is the rise of mobile games.
This was a study early in 2012 that found that 44% of people, US and UK,
have played a mobile game, something like an
Angry Birds on their smartphone in the last month.
So the games industry is big and it's developing, and I think it's
fair to talk about it as the mass medium of the 21st century.
Here are just a few statistics about usage numbers.
If you look at things like the Zygna games, lots
of people I talked about 100 million on CityVille, 250
million, quarter of a billion unique registered users and that,
it was already probably a few months old, they've surpassed that.
Angry Birds alone, over a hundred million.
Xbox Live games, 35.
World of Warcraft, over 10 million players.
World of Warcraft, those are paying players, so
that's even more important in terms of monetization.
The other important piece, though, is how much time people are using these things.
And so those 10 million World of Warcraft players
up here, if you look at the amount of time
they spend, it's actually huge, it's 50 billion minutes
a month, because they're playing for long periods of time.
Whereas something like Angry Birds, even though it has a higher user base, is only
a mere 12 billion minutes a month that
people are playing, because people use it less.
Still a pretty big number.
And if you look at something like the Xbox Live games, which are the
core console games, so therefore things people
play more, 120 billion minutes a month.
So, figure out how much that is across the player base
and figure out how much time that actually represents, relative traditional media,
it's not the same thing as people having their television on for
seven hours a day in the home, but this is interactive time.
It's time where the player is directly engaged in playing the game.
Big, big numbers.
