Gaming corners second largest slice of media pie, says Omdia research

The segment made $246 bn globally in 2022, behind online video's $306 bn, says research by Omdia

Gaming is big, but really how big is it?

Add both in-game advertising and the money consumers pay and games made a massive $246 billion globally in 2022. It is second only to online video, which got $306 billion in (ad and pay) revenues in the same year. In-game advertising was about $65 billion in 2022 and a bulk of that went to mobile gaming. More importantly, in-game advertising will come within kissing distance of linear TV by 2027. Pokémon and Resident Evil are the most frequently used gaming IP (intellectual property) in movies along with Digimon and Mortal Kombat. From 2022-2027, games will bring about 30 per cent of telecom carrier-billed digital services; online video will bring over 43 per cent.

Those were among the rather startling takeaways from “Gaming IP and its Meteoric Rise across the Entertainment Industry”, a piece of research presented by Maria Rua Aguete, senior research director, media and entertainment, Omdia, at a closed-door session at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam last month.

“There are more gamers than moviegoers,” points out Aguete. Across the US, UK, Japan and France, there are two times more gamers than cinema goers. In Germany and the UK, female gamers outnumber male gamers. These are some of the reasons that make converting a successful game to a movie or series and vice-versa extremely profitable. There were almost 20 such examples in 2022, a 47 per cent rise over 2021.

Aguete shared case studies on The Last of Us and Stranger Things. The Last of Us debuted as a game on the PlayStation3 (PS3) in 2013. The very next year, it was remastered for the PS4. In January this year, The Last of Us debuted on HBO to record viewership numbers. In the process, it revived the game, which saw a new release in 2022. Both the original game and the new versions saw a massive spike in sales when the series was running.

This is true for Netflix’s Stranger Things, too. Every one of its four seasons has been accompanied with a rise in the sale of the original game. “Netflix leads on streaming originals based on games,” says Aguete. In 2022, it had four video game-based originals against, say, one for Paramount. And it is betting the most on game-based IPs in the future, too, going by the shows announced so far, says Aguete. Though she did touch upon it, there wasn’t much in the research on the movement from film to game a la Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.