INTRODUCTION
For much of its 35+ year history, the games industry was broadly split into two markets: video games (i.e. console and handheld) and computer games. Until the early 90's, both markets evolved in much the same way, following a boom/bust cycle dictated by the shelf lives of the individual games hardware standards of the time. While the computer games market has since settled on a single, open and ever-evolving platform (Windows PCs), the larger video games market continues to comprise a succession of closed video game platform launches and so the market overall remains strongly influenced by cyclicality. However, the advent of network technologies has inspired a radical diversification of games platforms and stimulated strong growth in online PC gaming globally. Games’ increasing ubiquity and ever-broadening appeal is evening out the video games market’s cyclical peaks and troughs and resulting in an increasingly linear pattern of growth.
In the following sections we chart the games industry’s history to date.
