New research highlights game market leaders
A new report from market research firm Research & Markets has focused on the market leaders in the videogame industry, breaking up top publishers into four key sectors and outlining the key challenges facing each sector.
Titled "Market Leaders in the Video Game and Interactive Entertainment Industry", the report states that revenue growth across the industry increased by some 35 per cent in the last financial year, before going into more detail about the key industry companies covered in the study.
The first category of companies includes platform holders Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft along with top publisher Electronic Arts, and is simply titled as "Market Leaders". The report points out that in the 1995-2002 period, Sony made $36 billion from the interactive entertainment market, while Nintendo made $32 billion, concluding that "the momentum is clearly on Sony's side. Nintendo has been consistently profitable, but their revenue has not significantly grown in the past ten years."
In the second category of the report are the major Japanese publishers - Namco, Sega, Capcom and Konami - which the report says are "faced with problems of a declining arcade business and a slow Japanese economy." The biggest challenge for these firms, it concludes, will be expanding internationally.
Major American publishers Activision, Take-Two and THQ are the third category in the report, which makes the point that all three have grown significantly on the basis of only one or two very successful franchises. "Taking the earnings from their hit product lines and building a consistent, dependable revenue stream" will be the biggest challenge for these firms, it claims.
Finally, the report addresses its fourth category - European publishers Eidos, Infogrames/Atari, Ubisoft and Vivendi Universal Games. These companies, it says, "have larget product lines but face the challenging tasks of absorbing acquisitions, managing debt and builting up a solid marketing infrastructure outside Europe."