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.
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.
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.
Experts:
IBM, Sony, Toshiba
Timing:
Things happen because opportunities present themselves. The games industry has matured to such a point that high-risk investments can pay themselves back.