by Back in 1958, the first video game Tennis for Two in human history was released for the first time. A lot of time has passed since that moment – more than half a century. The creation of video games has reached a new level and has grown into an entire industry. Today GameDev is an IT industry that generates tens of billions of dollars.
A successful video game is not just a toy for your computer, console or smartphone. It’s a whole franchise. Based on video games, they make films and TV series, sell attributes with characters (T-shirts, caps, key chains and everything that can be imagined), use game characters in the media (advertising), and so on.
Our colleagues from the Alpari company have collected the top 20 game franchises in terms of value for all time. The numbers are really impressive.
The top lines of the rating are occupied by Mario and Pokemon. These are perhaps the most famous franchises in the world. Acquaintance with the world of 8-bit games in the 90s began with Super Mario. Who doesn’t know the kind mustachioed plumber who fights a dragon to free the princess?
Another example of a successful franchise is Pokemon. Pokemon began as an animated series that migrated to the world of computer games. The game Pokemon GO, which was born in 2016, made a lot of noise especially. This game is built on the F2P (free to play) model. For 4 years, the number of downloads of the game has exceeded 1 billion and the profit has exceeded a record 3 billion dollars.
The creators of the game conducted a unique social experiment – they connected the game landscape with the real world. This led to the incredible popularity of the game, but at the same time to an increase in accidents. There have been more than 100,000 car accidents worldwide that have been caused by Pokémon capture. In some countries, gamers even received prison sentences for “catching Pokémon in the wrong places.”
In general, the GameDev industry is developing dynamically and brings very good profits. In total, franchises from our rating have already earned more than $ 50 billion for their owners and continue to generate profits.
By the way, the other day one of the leading retailers shared information about the most popular console games in Russia. Can you guess which one won first place?
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