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Author profile
Harry Lawrence
Games Industry Analyst
9 min read
#Strategies
A Primer On eSports
On March 22, the Las Vegas Strip welcomed its first eSports arena. eSports Arena Las Vegas, a 30,000 sq. ft. venue that hosts large live gaming events, stands as a physical symbol for where the industry currently stands, and how far it has come. 10 years ago, in March 2008, Soulreapers/pure.gaming won the Play.com UT3 National Championship Final and took home £30,000 (about $71,000, adjusted for inflation). Four days before the Las Vegas arena opening, however, the Russian team won $800,000 from a prize pool of $1.5 million during the Dota 2 competition at WESG 2017 . Simply put: an eSports team in 2018 won over 11 times the prize money in a single competition than a team in 2008 won from an entire tournament. Starker still, in 1998, there were a total of 9 tournaments and 34 players in...
11 min read
#Ads & Monetization
Are Loot Boxes The Future Of Mobile Game Monetization?
In November 2017, EA released Star Wars Battlefront II, developed by DICE studio. The company was met with extreme criticism after it seemed to have not learned from its mistakes with its season pass approach in the first instalment. Famously, EA’s response to that criticism led to the most downvoted comment in Reddit’s history. The reason EA’s response garnered so much negative attention was that it ignored the growing discontent over its use of loot boxes, an increasingly common monetisation strategy in the gaming industry. Though the strategy has been around for over a decade, the success of Blizzard’s Overwatch was a pivotal moment for the loot box model, vastly increasing its visibility and popularity. It has only been in the past few years that the public dialogue has broadened to include parallels to gambling, and whether or not there...
9 min read
#Ads & Monetization
How Blockchain Could Redefine The Gaming Industry
To say that the gaming industry is large has become an understatement. For some perspective, the forecast for the number of cars sold worldwide in 2017 is 79.6 million, which brings the current estimate for the total number of cars on the road up to around 1.5 billion. Compare that with the current estimate for the total number of people who play video games: 2.2 billion. According to Newzoo’s latest Global Games Market Report, the global games market will have generated $108.9 billion of revenue in 2017. This is a 7.8% increase from the previous year, and is expected to rise to $128.5 billion in 2020. As we move into 2018, gaming is becoming less comparable with that of the film industry, and more with that of professional sports. However, regardless of size, bourgeoning industries come with obstacles, and gaming...