Video game industry

The video game industry is the tertiary and quaternary sectors of the entertainment industry that specialize in the development, marketing, distribution, monetization and consumer feedback of video games. The industry encompasses dozens of job disciplines and thousands of jobs worldwide. The video game industry has grown from niche to mainstream. , video games generated annually in global sales. In the US, the industry earned about in 2007, in 2008, and 2010, according to the ESA annual report. Research from Ampere Analysis indicated three points: the sector has consistently grown since at least 2015 and expanded 26% from 2019 to 2021, to a record ; the global games and services market is forecast to shrink 1.2% annually to in 2022; the industry is not recession-proof. The industry has influenced the technological advancement of personal computers through sound cards, graphics cards and 3D graphic accelerators, CPUs, and co-processors like PhysX. Sound cards, for example, were originally developed for games and then improved for adoptation by the music industry. In 2017 in the United States, which represented about a third of the global video game market, the Entertainment Software Association estimated that there were over 2,300 development companies and over 525 publishing companies, including in hardware and software manufacturing, service providers, and distributors. These companies in total have nearly 66,000 direct employees. When including indirect employment, such as a developer using the services of a graphics design package from a different firm, the total number of employees involved in the video game industry rises above 220,000. Traditionally, the video game industry has had six connected layers in its value chain based on the retail distribution of games: Game development, representing programmers, designers, and artists, and their leadership, with support of middleware and other development tools. Publishing, which typically includes both the source of funding the development of a video game, as well as providing the marketing and advertising for a game.