Gaming console market 2019 – how about a virtual 2020 Olympics?

I looked recently at the advantage the large installed base of mobile devices give us to help avoid travel and keep people in touch when forced into isolating themselves socially. Today I’m thinking about entertainment and communities; facing months more of social isolation I’m already bored of watching my sports channel on TV telling me there is no sport! Japan has yet to announce the – almost inevitable – postponement of the 2020 Olympics, so I suggest we arrange a virtual Olympics to take its place using the millions of gaming platforms already in place using Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, which was launched in November by Nintendo last year. This post looks at the gaming console market in 2019 with a forecast for this year.2019 wasn’t a fantastic year for sales of gaming consoles. We’re still waiting for new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, while even shipments of the Nintendo Switch have declined since being launched in May 2017. In total 47 million consoles were shipped (see my Figure above for annual shipments by platform since 2005), for which $33b was spent. I believe these will reduce further to 42 million and $27b this year.

Gaming software has done much better than hardware in recent years and, although there was a decline from the 2018 peak of $38b, 2019 saw us spend $34b – the second highest figure in history. I’m predicting that sales will decline to $30b in 2020 due to the immanent recession. Nevertheless what we spend on the software doesn’t say a lot about the use we make of it. A number of major titles give us the ability to challenge others around the world and some even have built-in communications.

In 2019 of the three ‘actor manager’ platform suppliers Nintendo was the market leader, while Electronic Arts was the largest of software-only players (see my Figure above). Their relative positions will no doubt change if and when new platforms are introduced by Sony and Microsoft.

I’ve seen a number of news items demonstrating the growing importance of gaming conventions and tournaments and. like many, have been surprised at how popular they’re becoming. In the current climate it is no longer possible to organise any events in which large numbers of people gather together physically, but we could do it virtually. So come on – let’s have a virtual Olympics!