Hi, I am in the process of doing a reserach paper, and I was wanting to state the over size of the games industry in terms of revenue. I often hear comments that the games industry world wide is slowly catching up to the film/televison industry and in some case I have heard that it has even over taken the music industry, but I can not find any reliable sources to say that this is true, has anyone got any idea where I might find this data? Ta for any help. -Alex

For accurate current info you will most likely have to pay one of the industry research companies. Free snippets are available but you have to hunt them down on news sites etc.

Some useful sites
http://www.theesa.com/pressroom.html
http://www.npdfunworld.com/funServlet?nextpage=pr_body.html&content_id=2076
http://www.elspa.com/about/pr/pr.asp?mode=view&t=1&id=478 (this one includes a worl-wide market estimate)

plus check out the companies listed at http://obscure.co.uk/directory_market.shtml

i've been working on gathering this info for my business plan:

| year | total | growth | PC  | growth | Console | growth |-----------------------------------------------------------  1995   3.2B  1996   3.7B   +15.6%   1.70B             2.0B  1997   5.1B*  +18.9%   1.80B             3.3B               *alternately reported as 4.4B  1998   5.5B    +8.0%   1.80B             3.7B             1999   6.1B   +10.9%   1.90B             4.2B  2000   6.0B    -1.8%   1.78B             4.1B  2001   6.3B    +7.9%   1.75B   -1.7%     4.6B     +10.0%  2002   6.9B    +9.5%   1.40B             5.5B  2003   7.0B    +1.0%   1.20B             5.8B*              *0.9B reported on mobile platforms  2004   7.3B    +4.0%   1.10B             6.2B*              *1.0B reported on mobile platforms

These figures are *officially* for US-made games sold in north american markets. I would imagine some of this money is from foreign made games, and some of these sales were from outside north america. It took alot of research to find all this info.

Double those figures to get world-wide (or thereabouts).

Cheers Guys.

You can locate that information on the idga.org site. I believe it might be in the whitepapers, however, you m/b an igda member. Well worth read'g the entire paper! Good luck. I thought I read it was an $8b industry and HAS surpassed the movie industry. Hope so!