Bloody gaming!
Despite the bastard that is Covid-19, the gaming industry in Australia has only taken a marginal decline in value for the year of 2019 (the first time it’s dropped since all the way back in 2012), and the news only gets better, with the emergence of new platforms, games and technologies expected to propel bloody gaming’s expansion in 2020 and beyond.
Ironically, it seems that it wasn’t bastard Covid-19 that was the cause for the downturn. Rather, the downturn seems to be a correction of sorts, thanks to the phenomenal consumer sales in 2018 of games like Fortnite, which 2019 couldn’t match.
The result? A softening the market by 10% across the board, with most categories experiencing a decline on the previous year.
According to the report from the IGEA (Interactive Games and Entertainment Association), the results in Australia with consistent with how the rest of the world trended, but the news only gets better for bloody gaming, with bastard Covid-19 expected to drive growth in 2020.
That’s right! This bastard pandemic is expected to drive growth, as people embrace the virtues of bloody gaming at a time when we were encouraged not to go out.
Despite the 2019 sales results, the Australian video games market is still 12% larger than it was in 2017, given the phenomenal growth that was experienced 2018. Subscription revenue also continues to boom, experiencing 28% growth in 2019 – the only category not to decline on the previous year.
That’s no surprise either, considering our trend towards such services.
Nintendo Switch hardware and software performed solidly in 2019 – and while it couldn’t offset the declines across Playstation 4 and Xbox One, which were both in the final year of their console cycle, all current generation platforms have generated strong results over recent years and ensured continual growth of the category.
All in all, it’s a bloody good prediction for the industry and proof that bloody gaming rocks!
If all else fails, they even sent through an infographic.
Here’s to the onward and upward of gaming! Rock on!
