Video game industry

Born with the appearance of the first coin-operated recreation machine in 1971, the video game industry has gone from being a mere technological curiosity to become one of the largest entertainment industries by volume of turnover in a few decades . It is estimated at 81.5 billion dollars in 2014 worldwide, doubling that of the film industry in the same year. Revenues come mainly from the sale of video games, video game consoles, accessories and recreational machines. The main countries in videogame revenues are the US, China and Japan, followed by Germany and the United Kingdom. Spain is in the tenth position, annually invoicing about 1,500 million dollars. 3

The video game industry employs more than 100,000 people around the world, people from many disciplines including programming, design, engineering, interpretation, finance, marketing, music, communication or trade. The value chain in the video game industry can be divided into 6 parts: investors, video game developers, creators of software used by developers, hardware manufacturers, video game distributors, and consumers.

The costs of developing a commercial video game vary enormously from the few thousand dollars that can represent a small title, developed by a single person, to more than 100 million dollars of some AAA video games, involving teams of up to hundred workers. The game with the highest development cost to date is Grand Theft Auto V , from the developer Rockstar Games, with 167 million dollars, followed by Destiny , from Bungie, with 154 million dollars. The figures are still considerably higher if investment in marketing is added.

The fairs video gamesthey constitute one of the main showcases where the industry presents its most recent creations every year. The best known worldwide are the E3 in Los Angeles (USA), the Gamescom in Cologne (Germany) and the Tokyo Games Show (Japan). In France the most important fair is the Paris Games Week and in Spain the Madrid Games Week, GameLab and GameFest stand out. In Chile, the Festigame stands out, being the most important in Latin America. Consumers are informed of the news of the sector mainly through specialized media. Among those belonging to the Hispanic field, we can highlight paper magazines such as Micromanía, New Superjuegos or Hobbyconsolas, and online magazines such as Meristation, Vandal, Eurogamer, Gamercafe, LagZero or Niubie. There are also numerous blogs and YouTube channels focused on this topic. However, its presence on television or radio is less.

Videogames have traditionally been sold in department stores or specialized physical stores; In Spain, the two main video game store chains are Game and, until its closure in 2014, Gamestop. In Chile, the largest are Zmart, MicroPlay and TodoJuegos. However, the trend in recent years around the world is towards the sale by downloading internet , both in PC and in consoles. In mobile devices, the sale through the internet - through the application stores - is in fact the only channel available.

The main industry associations in Spain are AEVI (Spanish Association of Video Games), which includes companies that invoice 90% of the total revenues of the sector, and DEV (Spanish Development of Video Games), which brings together the main developers of the country. In Chile there is the VGChile group, where the Chilean developers are grouped.