Anyone who follows gaming knows that the market has a lot of ups and downs. While some pundits have said that the market hasn’t been in the best shape, even with huge successes like Call of Duty, a new report tells us the gaming market could be finally be back, big time.
Deadline tells us that consumers paid $7.22 billion on downloaded games, and $1.83 billion for used games and rentals. Hardware sales are up 5%, and as one report claims, the fact that there’s three new consoles on the market is “a positive indicator for future market growth.”
In fact, the gaming pundits have predicted $7.3 billion for physical game sales this year, which isn’t anywhere near the peak of $13.6 billion in 2008, but there is “significant potential for growth,” and that will probably come from game streaming, which is predicted to increase over the next several years.
The site Motley Fool reports that Sony will have PlayStation Now, a cloud-based streaming service for gamers that the company feels will be a game changer, pun intended of course. As the site excitedly reports, “With a distribution model very similar to that of Netflix, PlayStation Now could even herald the end of game-console hardware as we know it.” And indeed, the current buzz on Now is it could become the “NetFlix of gaming,” and it will be interesting to see how this will affect the market in the next several years as well.
