Some interesting stats from the SuperData Report.
VR grew 27% over 2016. The majority of revenue was from hardware, the majority of hardware was Mobile.
Investment for AR/MR has been over 100% year over year in comparison to VR, with MR making up more than half of VR revenue by next year.
Pokemon Go , an "AR" game is still listed as one of the top 10 games on Mobile, of which the top 10 games make up at least 20% of all mobile revenue.
Other tidbits, Mobile games WAY outpaced all other systems combined. The mobile market took in nearly 60 Billion PC was at 33 Billion, and the rest combined were just around 15 Billion
Twitch captures 52% of all gaming viewership.
Comments
I do not doubt that as far as gaming goes this is an accurate enough report. I don't think it digs deep enough into the topic to really indicate that these are all-encompassing statistics. Speaking specifically to your statement regarding the amount of research being put into VR VS AR/MR.
Interesting numbers though. I wonder if the headaches, nausea, and other issues with full VR are causing the number of research monies to move towards the AR/MR market. This makes sense to me as everything I have read on the topic leans towards AR being far less uncomfortable while nearly as immersive. Also less likely to punch aunt Martha in the mouth while trying to fight your way through the living room.
Good article, it does bring up some good discussion points.
I refuse to go anywhere near Twitch however, I am not surprised (boob streamers + teenage males = Success) it has that much of the market. It needs some serious competition.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
I'd like to see more direct information on these numbers, and they usually do put out a report like that at some point during the year, but for the time being the information is pretty interesting.
I think at this time more people are buying VR hardware, like mobile headsets, mainly because nearly everyone has a device that's capable of using it. Unfortunately, as the article mentions, there isn't enough monetization to go around in terms of gaming and that leads to low software revenue. Meanwhile, in the AR scope, Pokemon Go is still insanely popular. With the new Harry Potter AR game arriving soon as well, it will be interesting to see if the AR headsets releasing this year will be able to capitalize on that.
As far as twitch is concerned, I was actually pretty surprised by the numbers. Youtube and Mixer are pretty large platforms too, I would have thought we would have seen close to a 40/30 split at least.
But, the report is from SuperData so can't take it seriously. Whilst I believe the data they collect is probably fairly accurate, the data they collect is far from complete so is useless when it comes to making these sorts of analyses.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
That being said, there is information that is harder to get, so with any kind of research company, polling place, etc. you have some analysis going on based on other numbers and factors.
In the end though, this is about as good as you'll get across the industry, even in comparison to other companies analysts such as forbes, the information and data may fluctuate some, but it usually ends in the same direction.
I don't doubt that the data SuperData collect is "good". I don't even dispute that they're the best at collecting data within the games industry. I'm not even disputing that having access to the data, via the paid reports, would be useful if I were a researcher at a games company.
What I am saying is that they don't collect enough data, therefore making any sort of analysis based on their data is pointless. For example, SuperData themselves state that they only collect data on approximately 500 games across all platforms. Now, Steam has 13,000 games listed, Android and iOS have what, 100,000 games? Add in another few 1000 for console games.
This means SuperData is only collecting data on less than 1% of the games market.
Add to this that the data is volunteered by the games companies or collected from publicly available statements and you begin to realise just how shakey the data is for making analyses. You cannot make predictions on gaming trends, growth or anything else when your dataset is miniscule. That's just bad statistics!
That being said though, I can't discredit everything they come up with, even if the numbers may be off a little, or it doesn't grab the entire picture of every game out there, the data points are still mostly relevant even if the rankings might be skewed.