Today the video game industry is rivaling the size of the motion picture industry and
surpassing the music industry in terms of overall revenue. Unlike the film industry,
which has a hundred year old history from the late 1880s, the video game industry
has perhaps become the fastest growing sector in the entertainment industry and has
done so in a relatively short period of time.
Currently, the video game industry employs over 120,000 thousand people only in
the United States, with the average employee earning US$90,000 a year. Its impact
is felt world-wide with video game players of all ages able to access games instantly
on devices ranging from consoles to smartphones. For many, their image of a video
game player is a teenage boy playing alone firing away at bad guys on a television
screen at home, but times have changed. Today, the average player has a choice of
a wide range of different types of games from action to adventure, role-playing to
sports, is in his or her thirties playing on a phone, tablet, console, or PC, possibly
connected with players from around the world.1 Not only have the demographics of
players changed dramatically in the last ten years, but so have the games themselves
with development and marketing budgets in the tens of millions of dollars or higher
for many games, with incredibly realistic graphics, voice-over, faithful depictions of
character movements produced through the use of motion-capture, music equal to
film scores and original story lines.