How big is gaming in the UK? According to figures on the website of the consumer and market data company Statista, the UK boasts the leading video gaming market in Europe.

When compared with the rest of the world, this becomes the sixth largest market, with a value of 5.3 billion GBP. The analysis also states the gaming industry has become the UK’s most lucrative entertainment sector. There are 44.32 million video game users in the UK, just a fraction of the 3.24 billion gamers across the world.

The success of video gaming

As you can see from the above, video games are a business that don’t just generate millions; they generate billions. The digital transformation of gaming has had a lot to do with this. New technologies and digital innovation, as well as much-anticipated online releases and mobile releases pushed up digital games revenue to $3.5 billion US dollars in the UK in 2020.

Online gaming has grown huge. In 2020, the global market generated roughly 21.1 billion US dollars in revenue. That’s growth of a record 21.9% compared to the year before. Today, there are an estimated 1 billion online gamers across the world, a number predicted to shoot past 1.3 billion in 2025. Global revenue from online gaming is expected to be around 19 billion US dollars in 2025.

Gambling and gaming

The numbers for gambling is steadily increasing throughout the years, becoming parallel to the popularity of gaming.

It’s not just pure video gaming that’s popular. Gambling has also been enjoying major popularity. Experts anticipate the global market to be worth more than 92.9 billion dollars in 2023. That’s a big jump from its current size of nearly 59 billion dollars.

The gambling market in the UK

Like citizens in many other countries, people in the UK enjoy a good gamble. Stats from the UK Gambling Commission for between April and September 2020 show the industry generated a total gross gambling yield of 5.9 billion GBP.

One popular market within the industry is online bingo. Stats reveal that gambling activity in the remote casino, betting and bingo sector triggered a total gross yield of 3.1 billion GBP.

Marketing have played a big part in the success of online bingo. In the 2000s, online bingo companies targeted traditional media, such as TV and radio, and adverts that featured celebrities advertising bingo became a common feature on British TV.

Rebranding bingo has made the game “cool” to a younger, tech-savvy audience and now all sorts of people are learning how to play bingo online. The generation that wants everything at their fingertips now has access to bingo and can log in for a game on their phones or other mobile devices whenever they want and wherever they want. Online or offline, younger players are loving bingo.

Social media has also had a hand in online bingo’s success in the UK. Facebook and some websites, for instance, have created free variations of the game that have been a hit with the public. These versions have triggered a natural desire for people to win some money and try out cash games of online bingo.

Stiff competition

It’s precisely because of gaming’s major popularity that experts predicted challenging times for the industry from 2019 onwards.

“How is your business powering up for the next gaming challenge?”, a study by Ernst and Young published in November 2019, found that although senior executives at gaming companies were optimistic about the future, gaming companies expected the following five years to be more challenging.

The popularity of gaming is pushing up the stakes, increasing the risk for companies and putting pressure on them to innovate to stay ahead of the competition. They also face higher talent costs in the industry and anticipate a shortage of talent.

The solution was felt to be that they must invest more in marketing. The study also recommended extra training for employees to retain them. These measures, however, will ramp up the pressure further that companies are already feeling on their margins.

What does the future hold for the industry?

Gaming has gone a lot more mainstream, especially cloud gaming, and it’s not only kids that are getting behind the console or PC or on the tablet. Adults have also been picking up controllers as a way of spending time with their kids and have been investing in gaming as a hobby. But what does the future hold?

Some experts see cloud gaming becoming the main source of distribution for gaming and that, although we’ll still be downloading games for a while just now, eventually people will buy a game and stream it immediately.

Others see virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) becoming a much bigger part of gaming. They feel headsets will become much lighter and more comfortable to use and that more people will be willing to wear technology that helps blend the game and reality.

Then there are experts who think artificial intelligence (AI) will change the face of gaming. Narrative games that take advantage of conversational AI may start to appear more.

Gaming has always been popular, but it seems to have exploded and is likely to keep getting bigger and bigger as tech advances. The UK, as much as any country, loves its gaming, whether that’s in the form of video gaming or a game of bingo, and most probably always will.