Some might wonder where is Nintendo in this ranking. Well, Nintendo has acquired “only” 7 studios as direct subsidiaries. However, Nintendo EPD is divided into ten internal production groups developing games like The Legend of Zelda, and all the Mario franchise. Nintendo is a different case for many reasons, including the type of content produce, which tends to be mostly lighthearted and family friendly, as opposed to the gore games available for Sony PlayStation and Microsoft xBox.
In 2017, Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch console, which saw an amazing success with more than 100 million units sold, ranking 5th in the hall of fame of the best selling consoles.
Unlike PlayStation and xBox that are exclusively playable when wired, Nintendo leads the market for handheld and hybrid devices.
With such as large user base, game developers have come up with many ways to monetise their efforts over time. In fact, as much as the Star Wars franchise in the big screen has built a long lasting legacy, games such as Pokemon, Mario, Call of Duty, Grand Tefth Auto, World of Warcraft, Halo — to mention a few — have been attracting players for more than a decade. And with the ability to update content dynamically, game adventures are literally never ending.
A growing trend in the video game industry is live service games: Multiplayer games that continually receive more content updates over time. They usually require no subscription fees to play but encourage players to purchases “seasons" of content, as if it was a Netflix entertainment TV series. Moreover, these type of games offers endless customisation opportunities. All of them come with a price tag, obviously.
Video games tend to have multiple currencies within their ecosystem, which often work as dependencies. For example, in Red Dead Redemption 2 — an open world game set in the Far West — players can earn Dollars, Gold, and Capitale while playing and repeating missions over and over again. When the player wants to customise the character, most items can be bought with Dollars and rare items with Gold.
Earning Gold in the game is slower than earning Dollars, so impatient players can access the in-game store, and purchase Gold using cash... the real-world cash, whichever is the currency in their country. On the other hand, Capitale can be used to play exclusive missions, being the game currency that can only be earned.
The reasoning behind this complex dynamic of multiple currency became popular after an experiment proved that as humans we tend to devalue currency, when a token enters into the equation.
For example, if we attend a food festival and we need to pay each item we eat in cash, we would buy less food than using a token. In fact, often fairs and festivals require visitors to exchange real cash for tokens at the entrance, and accept tokens only for the payment of goods. This step in between renders us numb to the transaction, as we perceive that we are not spending cash, but worthless tokens.
So, with more and more clever ways to entice players into spending recurrent amounts of money on their favourite video games, there is no doubt that the industry is set to continue growing.
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