Video games are all the craze these days! From classic gaming consoles to PC gaming and now, mobile gaming, which is becoming more ubiquitous than ever. Even with all that change in trends and advances in technology, one thing is for sure; we all love video games no matter what! If you’re an avid gamer, a fan, or just looking around, here are ten interesting facts about video games that you’d probably be surprised to learn about.
The highest-grossing launch in entertainment history is a video game.
As of 2019, the best opening box office movie of all time is Avengers: End Game with recorded earnings of $878,373,000 during its opening weekend. However, for the entertainment industry, it wasn’t the best yet because the video game, Grand Theft Auto V, is currently the one holding the record for the highest-grossing launch in the entertainment history with a whopping $1 billion in sales in just over three days. Pretty surprising, isn’t it?
The video games market is larger than both the music and film industry combined.
If you haven’t been keeping track, the market value of the video games industry in 2018 was $137.9 billion according to figures from Statista. On the other hand, the global box office revenue was only at $41.7 billion while global music revenues only grossed at $19 billion. Together, that puts the total at $60.7 billion, and that is barely even half of the whole market value of the video games industry. A lot of people are usually surprised to discover that but with the burgeoning popularity of eSports and mobile gaming, it would be hard not to notice.
Females comprise a huge chunk of the gaming population.
Contrary to popular belief that most gamers are males, women are also taking part in the gaming scene with females accounting for about 46% of the total population of gamers according to recent figures from GamingScan. The average age for these women is 34 years old.
There is a law that prohibits playing video games after midnight.
We all have those nights where we just can’t put our consoles, PC’s or mobile phones down because we’re so hooked into finishing a game that keeps us at the edge of our seats. However, the South Korean government doesn’t seem to enjoy this all too well. Apparently, they have enacted a law that forbids children under the age of sixteen to play video games from 12 midnight to 6:00 in the morning. And what better way to name it other than “Cinderella”? The “Cinderella Law” also known as the “Shutdown Law” aims to curb gaming addiction among children and obviously, get them to sleep properly.
World of Warcraft was used to study how people would react to a pandemic.
A coding accident in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, has been used by real-world epidemiologists to study and predict human behavior in the face of a global pandemic. Initially, the real intention was to cast a spell that is only supposed to inflict damage to a character every few seconds and allow that damage to be passed on to other characters in close proximity to the infected individual. Apparently, due to the coding accident, it turned into a full-blown plague infecting the whole world of Warcraft. During the incident, players gave different reactions that could closely mirror what could happen if a similar event would’ve happened in real life.
Did you expect any of these facts or were you taken off guard that these are true? Whatever your reaction was, we hope that we were able to entertain you and impart you with knowledge that you can somehow find useful in the future.
