Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 20

It would be a futile endeavour to question the impressive growth the
video game medium has enjoyed during the last decades— every aspect of
the game phenomenon has grown beyond every imaginable projection and
expectation: number of games, polygons, developers, gamers, consoles,
revenues, profi ts, etc.—e.g. Aoyama and Izushi (2003) note that the global
game industry grew more than threefold in revenues between 1994 and
2005 from US$5 to US$15 billion, and is projected to reach US$70 billion
by 2015 (Takahashi 2010). This is part of the very essence of the game
medium discourse—its phenomenal hypergrowth and its conquering of the
world—a game medium hero's journey narrative of sorts.
This is all indeed very impressive, but similarly to the monomyth steps of
the hero's journey, will the game industry face The Ordeal —a moment of
death and confrontation with its greatest fear—and exit with a rewarding
resurrectional transformation? Let's not, however, overanalyse the relevance
of Campbell's (2004) narrative theories as an interpretational framework for
the dynamics of the entire video game medium and industry. Nevertheless,
as certain as the expansion of the industry has been for the last decades, as
equally certain is its eventual contraction, slow-down, crisis and transfor-
mation. The growth of the game industry and its global popularity cannot
expand endlessly. It will be dictated either, in a best-case scenario, by over-
saturation of the global markets or, in the worst case, by a limitation in the
mass-cultural capacity of the medium and its aesthetics as such.
This culmination may have very well already happened. During the last
years (2009-2011) the game industry has experienced a decreased growth
in some areas, while the core sectors of the traditional console-centred
industry have noticed a substantial decline in its overall sales (Epstein
2011b). It may indeed be a temporary crisis dictated by the cyclical game
console business-related industry dynamics where the introduction of new
generation consoles creates market and industry uncertainty, which is fol-
lowed by developer budget escalation, market expansion and an inevitable
cycle decline (Dymek 2004). Parallel to this development there are also
noticeable signs of a major shift by consumers and developers to online-
based social gaming and freemium -based video games (Epstein 2011a) that
are not necessarily seen as part of the traditional game console-centred
industry (or more importantly not yet fully included in the oi cial game
industry statistics). Be that as it may, the game industry might have, or is
rapidly approaching, its peak of expansion. The relevant questions are: why
is this happening? What is causing this development? Is the game industry
indeed transforming itself and the medium into a more fragmented, nim-
ble, online-based, mobile-device-driven, freemium marketed type of casual
gaming phenomenon that will “in the future” actually surpass the current
console-based industry in terms of revenues and markets size? Are the $100
million mega-blockbuster game productions a dying breed of game medium
dinosaurs? Or will the industry continue supporting the (hard) core console