More money is spent on games than movies and music combined, says IHS

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Stat trackers IHS has shown its latest market data ahead of next week’s E3 – revealing that $92bn will be spent on games this year.

That is higher than music ($18bn) and movies ($62bn) combined.

The latest estimates from the firm also reveals that 80 per cent of this revenue will come from digital means – which just goes to show how important digital numbers are in terms of the overall health of the games market.

By contrast, digital movies will only account for 40 per cent of that sector, while digital music spend will account for 50 per cent, IHS claims.

While there has been a similar decline in physical media across games, movies and recorded music, games’ lead in the digital market is formidable,” said IHS analyst Piers Harding-Rolls.

This has been a remarkable transformation since 2008.”

The majority of the money will be made in the Asia Pacific markets (46 per cent), with Europe and North America accounted for 24 per cent of spend each. IHS repeated its previous prediction that China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest games market – it will be worth $20.3bn versus the US’ $19.7bn.

The digital-first markets of China, Korea and South East Asia have grown rapidly in recent years,” added Harding-Rolls. Accelerated spending on apps has resulted in a rapidly changing industry landscape in these markets, as traditonal PC-based companies build vast divisions to tackle the burgeoning mobile opportunity.”

Having said that, PC will remain the biggest platform for games spending in 2015 (worth $34bn globally). IHS says that the platform’s value has increased by $21bn in the last ten years.

However, smartphones and tablets will overtake PC by 2017, and will be worth $40bn alone by 2019.

With the rapd internationalisation of the games business, plus the significant growth of PC and mobile, it will be interesting to see if this will be reflected at E3, which has historically been primarily focused on the US market and the consoles business.