Diversity, streaming reshape video games for a fresh generation
In the quarter of a century since Sony launched the groundbreaking PlayStation, video gaming have exploded into the biggest form of entertainment on the planet, and analysts say the growing diversity of vast amounts of players is reshaping the industry.
JAPAN tech giant and its American rival Microsoft are getting ready to launch their latest consoles in a few days, competing in a $160 billion global market -- bigger than film and music combined.
Earlier viewed as niche entertainment usually marketed to teenagers, gaming has benefited from a 1990s push to attract more customers, analysts say, with the PlayStation at the forefront in breaking down gender, age and class barriers.
"In the last couple of decades, we have witnessed a solid move towards the democratisation of gaming. Twenty-five years back, gaming was still considered by most of the people a marginal form of entertainment," said Guilherme Fernandes, market consultant at the gaming and esports analytics firm Newzoo.
After the PlayStation came Microsoft's Xbox in 2001 and Nintendo's Wii in 2006, accompanied by the smartphone revolution as gaming's popularity skyrocketed.
There are 2.7 billion gamers worldwide, Newzoo estimates, and nearly half are women.
Gamers have also become older in many major markets -- this range of the common gamer in america is 35-44, based on the Entertainment Software Association.
Affordability has also earned a bigger audience, authorities say. Sony caused a stir with a surprisingly low price for the first PlayStation, which proved a commercial success.
"If we correct for inflation, consoles are so much cheaper today than these were in the 80s and 90s. It had been really... an upper-middle-class sort of entertainment at that time," said Mikael Jakobsson, research coordinator at the MIT Game Lab.
The impact was clear in america, he said, "where in fact the PlayStation began to appeal to lower-middle-class, working-class persons in a manner that previous console generations just hadn't".
The spread recently of economical yet highly capable smartphones has further broadened audiences, with people playing games on the mobile devices and connecting over social media.
With games becoming a more universal pastime, the impression that these were the domain of teenagers has been challenged.
"Developers are increasingly taking diversity seriously, expanding the number of female and minority lead protagonists in their games," said Newzoo's Fernandes.
That shift, however, has been definately not smooth, and came after years of warnings that misogyny, bullying and other toxic behavior were rampant in gamer culture.
The industry was forced to act following the first high-profile wave of harassment in 2014, dubbed Gamergate, which started after an ex-boyfriend falsely accused American game developer Zoe Quinn of seeking favorable reviews in trade for sex.
Quinn -- who goes by non-gendered pronouns -- faced rape and death threats, and their private information was leaked online.
Women in the market and feminist figures were also threatened by persons angered by efforts to really improve female representation in games.
Game giants were accused of tolerating or turning a blind eye to the abuse.
"It could sometimes be difficult to make clear precisely how vicious, violent, and cruel" Gamergate was, Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and target of some of the abuse, wrote on the website Polygon last year.
Major game organizations have denounced such behavior and made diversity pledges, including more women and persons from underrepresented communities as protagonists.
Regardless of the efforts, critics say such abuse and content remain a problem in the industry -- among players in addition to gaming companies.
Ubisoft, among the world's biggest the administrators, dismissed a few of its top executives this season after a wave of accusations of sexism and harassment shook the firm.
It is not simply gamers who have become more diverse, but also the ways that people enjoy games.
Video games are actually a spectator sport too. Major tournaments attract a large number of fans and revenues from esports are expected to go up to $1.1 billion in 2020, according to Newzoo.
Fans also have flocked to view others play online, a social media-gaming crossover that has pulled in a number of the world’s biggest tech companies -- Amazon-owned Twitch and Google's YouTube are two of the most used platforms.
"The rise of gaming streamers... has just inflated beyond any expectations," said MIT's Jakobsson.
Some have suggested that video games is seen in the same light as other conventional spectator events.
Jesper Juul, a video game theorist at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, had a simple explanation for the growing selling point of video gaming for spectators: "It's like watching sports, it isn't particularly strange for the reason that sense."
Source: japantoday.com
