Growth of the Gaming Industry

Description:

The games industry has been growing enormously over the last few years. From the moment you could own and play a game-console type machine in your house, such as the Amiga, it has taken off. However, only recently has the games industry grown sufficiently large that it can now start making multi-billion dollar investments and expect to earn that back. This has given the industry an enormous momentum, and games hardware & software are now on the cutting edge of technology. In fact, the games industry is on the brink of overtaking 'normal' computer technology with the newly announced Cell processor, a joint venture between IBM, Sony and Toshiba. What makes this processor so special is not only the fact that it can do more calculations then an average Pentium4 processor by a factor of 100, but the Cell processor has multiple cores, and each of these cores communicate with each other to form a grid. Moreover it can automatically search for other Cell processors on a network and will form a distributed grid with them. This technology looks extremely promising, and will most likely be applied outside the games industry on a large scale, as the benefits are simply amazing and limitless. In addition, PC based game market is growing due to high speed internet. There are many kinds of PC games whose users are from child to adults and some of them are useful for education. Therefore, internet based PC game will have more chance to dominate game market than the video game.

Enablers:

- The increasing number of people playing games all around the world have made these investments possible, - Additionally, people are increasingly demanding their leisure time, instead of working. This leisure time will in some instances be translated with gaming (directly or indirectly through playing with their children), - Technological advances in graphics and processor technology. - Internet game remove the limit of locations. The favor of internet, the PC game players can play with their friends who lives far from their locations.

Inhibitors:

Inhibitors at the moment seem to be few and far between, as the industry is booming. However bringing games-technology into the mainstream might prove difficult.

Paradigms:

As gamers have grown more demanding over the years, the industry has had to answer this. Today very specific architectures are built for the game consoles. Both processor and graphics have had to be specifically optimized for these kinds of applications, as normal computer processors and graphics cards are (were) not up to the standard. Sony Playstation 2's emotions engine was the first console to fully create a console specific architecture, it will take the industry by storm again with its Playstation 3, not least due to the Cell processor. - Lots of venture business entered into PC game industry as game developper. So this phonmenant doesn't seem to be stopped for a while. This rush (to the PC game) gives the gamers more choice and promotes the PC game industry.

Experts:

IBM, Sony, Toshiba - Internet game business of Korea : Nexon, NCsoft,Hangame soft and so on.

Timing:

Things happen because opportunities present themselves. The games industry has matured to such a point that high-risk investments can pay themselves back. - In order to talk about PC game industry, we can't say without internet. The booming of internet is clear opportunity to someone who play in the PC game currently. Someone took the chance in spite of the risk and enjoyed the benefits of first comers.

Web Resources:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948493.html?tag=fd_top

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html