I remember when I was a young teenager, I used to love playing video games. Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Madden and NBA Live were among my favorites. In order to play these games though, you had to have a game console. That meant having the latest Xbox or Playstation, which prices ranged from $300-$500, depending on the latest console update. That is a lot of money and you also have to add in the fact that game prices ranged from $50-$70. So multiply my purchases with millions of people doing the same purchases, you get a multi-billion dollar industry.
According to The Entertainment Software Association, this is an industry with 155 million American users. In 2014, American consumer spending within this industry was $22.41 billion. This number is more than both American consumer spending on music and American consumer spending on movies. From these statistics, you can see that the video game industry is supplying very high demand.
If you have an entrepreneurial mind, you are most likely wondering how you can position yourself to partake in this industry that is predicted to experience continued growth. One way is to become a game developer. This article explains all the specifics related to being hands on within the video game industry from coding, to the art side and setting up your own studio. It is important to learn the ins and out as with any industry, so that you can understand how to be most effective with your efforts.
Even if you don't want to get into actually designing games, you can still create a business that revolves around the popularity of video games. One such route is being a gamer. These are people who are paid to play in game tournaments and who are even given endorsement deals based off of their popularity within the gamer community. These guys are earning six figures for being celebrities within a community that represents a very lucrative industry.
If being a gamer doesn't fit you, then you can create a website dedicated to video games. These are usually game cheat sites and game review sites that earn money from advertisements. That means a lot of traffic has to be generated by these sites in order to make good money. One way to make this work for you is by creating a YouTube channel based on video game reviews and your gameplay. Doing this helps build up an engaged audience. From YouTube, you direct this audience to your website, which helps to grow it's community and further develop your online business.
I am not really a gamer today but I do have Clash of Clans on my iPad, which I check about 2-3 times a day in between work. Reading up on Clash of Clans strategy led me to Authority Cheats. They had an interesting article about Clash of Clans that I had a personal experience with myself. Most tablet games are initially free but people tend to become addicted to them. Once the freebies are gone you become enticed to spend money on other features within the game so that you can continue to grow what you started. I know because I spent almost $100 on Clash of Clans about a week after I downloaded the game because it was that addictive. Now imagine that number multiplied by hundreds of thousands of people.
The video game industry is projected to keep growing and enterprising minds surely are thinking of how they can attach themselves to this growth. If I wasn't busy building my businesses, I would spend some time on claiming my piece of the action. But that is exactly why we work hard to build successful businesses. So that we can invest within profitable industries and cash in on their demand and growth. I see very promising opportunity in the video game industry.