So recently I have been playing the new Legends of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Its the latest title of the Zelda series, available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch. Yet Zelda and Nintendo are just some of the hundreds of games and publishers out there. There are countless of games out there, intended for different audiences and made across the globe. So you might not think about it usually, but where do all these games come from?
The Emergence of the Video Game
The origins of the video game industry is closely intertwined with the Space Race, the Cold War and the development of the computer. What some consider to have kickstarted the industry, Spacewar is “the brainchild of a group of engineering graduate students working in the basement lab at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT)”. The game consists of two players controlling rocket ships, shooting torpedoes at each other. The location and theme of Spacewar is not a coincidence – after all, the game was made on technology made for the military.
After the launch of the Soviet Sputnik, the United States decided to push for deeper connections to academia and business – they invested into academic institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford and corporations developing computer equipment, such as IBM, General Electronics. These connections have ushered the United States in a new information age, creating the new tools necessary to advance and innovate. And it is these tools which hackers used to create video games. In this context, hackers are not criminals who gain access to information and the newly created hardware. Instead, hackers were people who were allowed to mess around with these new tools and computers, and try to imagine alternative functions and purposes of these machines – an activity which was actively encouraged. Instead of using a computer to calculate and simulate the trajectories of actual missiles and airplanes, these computers were instead used to simulate fictional ones for entertainment.
The Video Game of Today
When we think of video games today, we don’t think of modified American knick-knacks funded by the military being toyed with by graduate students. Instead, we’re sooner to imagine international corporations such as Nintendo making consoles and games, such as the Nintendo Switch. Maybe we think of the ever-growing eSports scene, consisting of dozens of games with thousands of players across the globe.
When we look at some of the biggest studios, such as Riot Games, Electronic Arts and Activision-Blizzard, these three are all located in the Bay Area of California. This is not just limited to the large studios as well, as even indie developers are located in that area. Eric Barone, professionally known as ConcernedApe and the developer and self-publisher of “Stardew Valley” is located in Los Angeles. Yet video games have become such an international phenomenon that there is no way that they can be condensed within a single area. Having mentioned them a few times already, Nintendo and SEGA are both located in Japan, while Ubisoft is positioned in France. This is without even mentioning the recent emergence and appeal of indie games. Massive Monster, the studio behind “Cult of the Lamb” is located in Melbourne, Australia, while Tarsier Studio who created “Little Nightmares” are based in Sweden. These are but a few examples which showcases the globalization of the industry, but I hope to have shown how wide spread the Video Game industry is.
What I have discussed until now though is simply on the developer’s side of the industry. Where we have studios making games, we also have people playing them. A quick look at the Steam Global Traffic Map reveals some data on where their userbase is and how much they actually download off of Steam. While Steam’s data is by no means definitive, it does give us a rough outline on the reach that video games have on the current landscape. And there is definitely a massive interest in video games. One example I can think of is when I tuned into the finale of Valorant Masters Madrid on Twitch. That stream reached a peak concurrent viewership of 3.1 million, with an average minute viewership 1.1 million viewers.
Further Growth of Video Games
Knowing where video games have started and where they are now, it leads me to wonder how much farther this growth is going to be. If we were to look at the heatmap, I highly doubt that the reach is going to expand much further. This is because there is an inherent tie between economic wealth and access to video games. On the other hand, there is a growing market in existing economic spheres where people who were never interested in video games might pick one up. Perhaps we’ve reached a status quo and that’s the end of actual spread. But one thing is for certain: video games have become huge.
Another important aspect of video games, that had a major impact on its growth, is the ‘popular conception of video games’. The popular conception for video games was mostly negative for a long time, which is why “video games are bad for you” is still such a common phrase. This stigma of video games has (luckily) changed a lot during the last decade(?), which is evident in the gaming industry even surpassing Hollywood’s. The creation of various kinds of video games, on multiple platforms and mediums, in different parts of the world in this globalized industry, has also produced different kinds of gamers as a result. It is indeed also through continuous advancements and innovation in this industry that this has been possible.
While I agree that the growth of the video game industry will eventually settle down (as it happens with many other things), I also think that it would be really interesting to look at the development of different types of games, regarding their medium, game mechanics, or story . An example is the use of ‘Souls-like games’ or even the rise of ‘mobile gamers’.