Back then, nobody had even thought of using computers to deliver entertainment. It all started back in the 1940s and 50s when the personal computer was but a figment of imagination in the minds of some extremely intelligent people. So how did we get here? The Great Grandaddy Of Video Games – Nimatron
Gaming was considered a niche, and gamers were stereotyped as basement dwellers with too much free time. You feel much more involved, and every year we keep getting closer to photorealistic visuals.īut things were extremely different just 20 or 25 years ago. There is no doubt that gaming as a form of entertainment is in its own league, and it delivers a form of storytelling that is completely different from watching a movie. And the number keeps growing daily, with record revenues being posted each consecutive.
We have more games than there are people in the city of Washington, DC. Today the games industry is a multibillion-dollar juggernaut that has consistently outperformed movies and music combined for the past decade. You might as well go to a beach and start counting the number of sand particles. Just one website like this has hundreds of Flash games on it, and there are thousands of such websites out there. Because that will literally take the total into the millions. For retro consoles, it is hard to get an exact number because when you go on ROM sites, they list literally every hack ever created for the original titles, along with regional releases as separate games.įor example, the US and European versions of certain console games back in the day were optimized differently- identical games but tuned for 50Hz TVs instead of 60Hz.įinally, we aren’t going to count Flash games and HTML5 based mini-games for browsers. Secondly, you’ve got to consider the fact that a lot of these games were copies of the big commercial successes from that time, such as Space Invaders, Mario, or Pong. Many of these machines from the ’80s were user-programmable, so we’re talking about potentially tens of thousands of indie games that were never commercially released. This is done for two reasons- firstly, it would be impossible to account for all the homebrew titles that random people came up with for these older personal computers. The same has to be done for the console side of things we cannot account for the games released on retro consoles such as the SNES, Nintendo 64, etc.
But then you’ve got to consider the fact that the PC market isn’t exactly covered with Steam sales alone, even though that is the biggest online game distribution platform.įor the sake of simplicity, we must leave out games created for older platforms like the Apple II, Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, and other extremely old personal computer platforms. The simple way to do it would be to calculate the total number of games on each platform and add it all up. If you like this article and want to know more information about the gaming industry, I suggest you will check my postīut CD Projekt Red released two amazing expansions titled “Hearts of Stone” and “Blood and Wine,” which can be considered complete games by themselves because they add new stories and areas to the base game with several hours of additional playtime and content.Īnd what about remasters, like how Activision released a version of the original Modern Warfare with updated graphics in 2016. Do those count as separate games from the base version? For example, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an amazing RPG filled with interesting characters and a compelling storyline. Many popular games often get massive expansions, DLCs, and remasters.
Is it Triple-A releases from big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and Activision? Do we also consider Indie games and casual/ hyper-casual games on mobile? What about some homebrew game code is written up by Eugene in his bedroom when he was 15? We need to consider exactly what we’re trying to count as a “video game” here. Well, the answer isn’t quite straightforward. But is this really the total number of video games in existence? While you could go on Wikipedia and painstakingly count every single game released for the PC ever, a much easier way to do it is by looking at Steam and other online distribution platforms such as GoG, Uplay, Origin, etc.įor mobile, we can check out Statista, which gives us data on the number of available gaming apps in both the Apple App Store and Google Play store.įor console, we will consider the Switch, PS4, and Xbox One since these are the current-gen platforms owned by most people. 5 Conclusion How I Found How Many Video Games There Is