By 2024, 50% of the world’s population will play games

The gaming industry is benefiting from social isolation due to the global spread of Covid-19. But the industry itself is also facing revolutionary changes, thanks to the rapid development of infrastructure and technology in the IoT era.

By 2024, an estimated 3.5 billion people play the game, accounting for nearly half of the world’s population.

The latest report from ABI Research and InterDigital points out that the opportunity is immense for carriers, Internet service providers or manufacturers of original equipment, because by 2024, there are an estimated 3, 5 billion people play video games, accounting for nearly half of the world’s population.

This figure is calculated based on the current 2.3 billion game players and is expected to grow over the years thanks to the push of livestream and cloud gaming platforms. Also according to the report, by 2024 the Asia-Pacific region will become a hot spot of the game market when accounting for 51% of the total number of global gamers. North America ranks behind, accounting for 20%.

The report appreciated the ability of cloud gaming services to dominate the market, but also recommended that these service providers need to rethink their business models when the market is still developing. ABI recommends that the current OTT services charge a monthly / quarterly / yearly subscription, but users prefer a one-time payment plan even though the payment may be larger than the usage period.

Compared to the mobile data market, the report shows that the pay-as-you-go data plan is less common but may be a better optimization strategy for the cloud gaming market, especially in the challenge of switch habits, PC user behavior and console.

In particular, the report believes that not only traditional games but opportunities to expand market share also come from adding game elements to other areas of life, such as fitness. And the non-gamer user experience will also be richer thanks to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies on cloud gaming.

Currently, the cloud gaming market is gradually shaped by products of big companies such as Google’s Stadia, Microsoft’s xCloud, Nvidia’s GeForce Now or Sony’s PS Now.