randform

“Wann dreht der Avatar Gardner wieder am Nasenhockeystick?” by artist: Superkockaina; pastel and acryl on paper. Artwork found in Tatoo studio: “Haut hin”.

I am currently trying to gather some data on the size of the games/virtual goods market and in particular the size of the corresponding work force. According to the company superdataresearch the virtual goods market is now at about 15 billion $.

To get a feeling for the size of this market I was looking for some other market sizes so like I found the global market size for the production of drugs in 2003 was somewhat similar in size, namely around 13 billion $ (page 16 in the world drug report):

“The value of the global illicit drug market for the year 2003 was estimated at US$13 bn at the production level, $94 bn at the wholesale level (taking seizures into account), and US$322 bn at the retail level (based on retail prices and taking seizures and other losses into account).”

I couldn’t found though much on the workforce in this market.

Regarding again the games/virtual goods market superdataresearch writes:

APAC is the biggest region with $8.7 billion in total virtual goods sales, with China”s $5.1 billion market leading the pack.

For comparision, the US makes a share of about 3 billion $ according to Tech Crunch/Inside Virtual Goods:

“The overall market for virtual goods in the US is headed towards $2.9 billion for 2012, according to the Inside Virtual Goods report. That’s up from $2.2 billion this year, and $1.6 billion in 2010.”

Here I found as a comparision the US meat market which seems to have a size of about 7 billion dollar.

In the meat market the work force comprises around 44000 people. So if one would make the ad-hoc assumption that the game and the meat markets are approximately equally labour intensive (which is actually an interesting question) then about 20000 people in the US would make their living in the US game market. Likewise worldwide this would give roughly 100000 people.

Any more precise data in this direction is welcome.

update Sept. 23, 2017:
According to a presentation by what looks like a virtual goods trading company called Swapster (the website at www.swapster.com is currently blank) given at open day 2015 at Deutsche Börse Group; Contact person: Alexander Höptner:

“The virtual items market is estimated to surpass $52 billion in 2016, with a CAGR of >6 per cent and a monetisation rate of 2–5 per cent.”

They provide also some more estimations:

“The global games market is estimated to amount to $92.5 billion in 2015, with a year-on-year growth of 9 per cent.”

and

“The number of active gamer accounts
worldwide will amount to 2.4 billion in 2020.”

The presentation lists as Sources: Super Data Research – Virtual Goods Market Size 2014 – 2020E; NEWZOO Study, The Global Games Market 2015 – April 2015

Unfortunately I haven’t found direct links to this data on super data research.
Whatsoever – it seems the estimations of May 2015 for the global games market were according to super data research 74.2 billion US$. The blogs futurelab and serious game market have graphics of how the various segments of the global games super data research market estimations for 2015 look like.

Title: “Kreative Mode beim Bedrockabgrundste-in”, oil on canvas, artist: Mudda Prahler

There was recently a post on Gamasutra with the title: Titanfall: Why Respawn is punishing cheaters. The computer game Titanfall is a First person shooter that can be played with a couple of people in one environment. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

Players fight either on foot as free-running “Pilots” or inside agile mech-style walkers called “Titans” to complete team-based objectives[2][3] on a derelict and war-torn planet[4] as either the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation (IMC) or the Militia.[5]

I don’t know Titanfall (In general I have been playing first person shooters rather rarely) but what apparently happened was that there where too many people cheating in the game.

In the post it isn’t really described what exactly is implied by cheating, but what I refer from the “punishment” announcement, I think what was happening was that some people used game bots and in particular socalled aimbots, which are software solutions which make shooting easier in such a game. From the Titanfall announcement:

You can play with other banned players in something that will resemble the Wimbledon of aimbot contests. Hopefully the aimbot cheat you paid for really is the best, or these all-cheater matches could be frustrating for you. Good luck.

I was asking myself though wether this action is part of some viral marketing campaign. That is that some cheaters could think that it could be way cooler to “win the Wimbledon of aimbot contests” rather than the usual game. Given that Titanfall had however performance problems which as it seems where due to overloaded game servers and connections, it doesn’t though look as if this would improve with aimbot contests.

In this context:

In a citation about a report by a tech- and investment-advisory firm in the time article: The Surprisingly Large Energy Footprint of the Digital Economy

In his report, Mills estimates that the ICT system now uses 1,500 terawatt-hours of power per year. That’s about 10% of the world’s total electricity generation

The New York times article: Power, Pollution and the Internet remarks the following about e.g. US data centers:

Nationwide, data centers used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the country that year, based on an analysis by Jonathan G. Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University who has been studying data center energy use for more than a decade. DatacenterDynamics, a London-based firm, derived similar figures.

A summary of the last IPCC report about climate change and global warming.

and:

In Berlin there is currently the International games week Berlin.

numberlock: If you find all the mines at once and in the right order you may eventually get in.

There is currently an interesting discussion about secret services and their relation to mathematicians at the mathblog n-category cafe.

For Berliners and those who can afford to go to Berlin for a quick trip I would like to mention an absolute must see exhibition, namely the exhibition Generation Z: Renoise about the russian musical avantgarde in the 20s and later which is curated by L. Pchelkina, A. Smirnov, P. Aidu, K. Dudakov-Kashuro and E. Vorobyeva. The exhibition is unfortunately not as highly promoted as it should – given how fabulous it is! I hope that this post makes some more people visit it. It is definitely worth it! The exhibition is in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunstraum (unfortunately not so easy to find), it runs until Feb.23, 2014. It is free of entrance and open from 12:00-19:00 o clock.

The exhibition has the themes: Projectionism and Radio-ear, Revasavr, GIMN Institute, Theremin, Graphical Sound, Industrial Noise Machines, Amateur Noise Instruments and Destruction of Utopia. Below is a small excerpt from the respective themes. A lot of details can also be found in Andrei Smirnov’s book “Sound in Z“.

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Today is The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance. “Fighting back” means here that you may endorse the rather sound formulated International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance like by leaving your name and email adress and/or that you may display a banner on your website as a sign of your disagreement with mass surveillance.

-> related: randform article on surveillance

A new video of one of Tims recent music projects (a video about the ladder filter is here). In the video he explains the construction of a spring reverb:

A detailed description on how to build the spring reverb can be found on the astlab page.

A soundtrack on soundcloud of how the spring reverb sounds:

Tim and a bit of his music projects will eventually appear in a new film by film maker Ekaterina Eremenko. That is we had a film team from Moscow here at home. But it is sofar not clear wether the material will be used.

Ekaterina Eremenko, who has also studied math, received recently much attention for her film colours of math (trailer) featuring amongst others the rather well-known mathematicians Cedric Villani, Anatoly Fomenko, Aaditya V. Rangan, Günter Ziegler, Maxim Kontsevitch and Jean-Michel Bismut.

I don’t know if this is a new trend but I found incidentally more recent films where features of the life of mathematicians are documented. Like at the website of the “Higher Algebra section” at Moscow State University I found interviews with V. N. Latyshev talking About academic mathematics (in russian) and about Reminiscences of A. A. Markov (in russian) made by Andrei Verovkin who features a whole series of interviews with scientists.

In this context a short note for those who are in or are planning to go to visit Berlin: There were/are currently music festivals for more modern music taking place in Berlin, which enhance the usual club life or on the more classical level regular events like e.g. the weekly series “Unerhörte Musik im BKA”. One was the Ultraschall Festival and one is the ctm festival, which is in cooperation with the festival for art and digital culture “transmediale”. The transmediale theme of this year is “afterglow:”

The conference takes afterglow as a metaphor for the present condition of digital culture, examining the geopolitical, infrastructural and bodily consequences of the excessive digitisation that has taken place over the course of the last three decades.

alcohol may alter brain states

For those who are interested there is a discussion about determinism and freedom, free will, privacy etc. at the blog backreaction following a post with the title: 10 Misconceptions about free will, which I found problematic. If you want to know more you may read my comment also after the klick.

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randform wishes all it’s readers happy holidays and a good new year 2014!

rest of a silvester rocket in a tree in the outskirts of Berlin

We preferred to stay in the outskirts of Berlin on New Years Eve. Even in the outskirts there is still enough fireworks. An aquaintance of us lost a couple of years one eye by just walking on new years eve on a street. If you still want to experience new years eve in Berlin then since there are no noise barriers and roofs against rockets and bangers on the street then our advise is to at least use some hearing protectors if that doesn’t give you too much head aches and safety glasses when moving around on the streets of Berlin on that time of the year.