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What the $47 Billion Game Console Market Figure Meant in 2018

IHS Markit was reported to have valued the game console market at $47 billion in 2018. Here’s what the estimate includes—and what its source leaves unclear.
From TheFinanceBase Team2 min to read
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IHS Markit estimated that the game console market reached $47 billion in 2018, about 20% higher than a year earlier, according to a May 2019 report by GizChina. That is a historical estimate—not a current market value. The underlying IHS Markit report is not linked in GizChina’s article, so its geography, revenue definition and methodology cannot be independently confirmed from the available account.

What was the game console market worth in 2018?

GizChina’s May 20, 2019 article, by Argam Artashyan, attributes a $47 billion 2018 market estimate and roughly 20% growth to IHS Markit. The figure is best understood as a reported estimate: the article does not specify the market’s geographic scope or explain which revenues and businesses its total includes.

Because those details are unavailable, the $47 billion figure should not be treated as a directly comparable measure of today’s console market, or as a verified accounting of a particular country’s spending. The source is GizChina’s May 20, 2019 report.

What drove the reported growth?

The account describes strength across console hardware, content and services, while identifying packaged content as the one spending area that declined. It does not provide separate dollar totals for hardware or for the individual content and service categories, so the overall $47 billion figure cannot be apportioned among them from this report alone.

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Hardware sales

GizChina says Nintendo Switch’s success helped global console sales reach their highest level in a decade. It also says Xbox One and PlayStation 4 maintained their global market share. These are reported explanations and observations, not evidence that any one console alone produced the market’s overall growth.

Content and services

The article reports that combined console content and services spending rose from $27 billion in 2017 to nearly $32 billion in 2018. Those figures describe the combined category; they should not be read as separate totals for content and services.

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Packaged content spending was reported to have decreased, even as the broader combined content-and-services figure increased. The article also names complete game downloads, paid downloadable content, virtual currency and passes among the market’s digital offerings, but gives no spending totals for any of them.

Nintendo Switch Online

The article says Nintendo Switch Online represented 1% of the console market’s service area in 2018. It does not explain what that percentage uses as its denominator, so it is not possible to translate it into a dollar amount or interpret it as a share of the whole $47 billion market.

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How to use this figure in a financial comparison

The estimate can serve as a snapshot of how one 2019 article characterized the 2018 console business. It is not enough on its own to establish a current market size or a like-for-like growth trend. A sound comparison with another year would require figures using the same geographic coverage, revenue categories and methodology—details not supplied for this estimate.

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