The past five years, the game industry’s revenue has jumped from $6.9 billion to $10.4 billion. Chris Satchell’s, General Manager of Microsoft’s Game Developer Group, pointed out at Gamefest (Seattle, USA) that the user reach remained the same these past five years.
Simply put, games have not been reaching new consumers. This is a problem we’ve seen Nintendo set themselves up to address with the Nintendo Wii, a disruptive technology, designed to bring new users to videogames later this year. Satchell pointed out that the videogame industry has been making its money from the same consumers. That’s why Microsoft hopes to reach a wider audience with their Xbox Live Arcade casual games.
Satchell also pointed out that across all of Microsoft game platforms, Microsoft has roughly 100 million users per month. Obviously almost all computers worldwide run Microsoft Windows, so that’s a huge market right there.
Here’s the full list of Microsoft gaming platforms and their players:
* Games For Windows – 80 million
* MSN Games – 13 million
* Windows Live Messenger – 16 million
* Xbox 360 – 5 million
* Xbox Live Arcade – 5 million
* Xbox Live – 2 million
Via 1UP