ABSTRACT
The games industry had $180 billion revenue and 3 billion players in 2021. It was growing fast. Digital downloads and subscription services were up, and usage shifting to mobile. Development of games demands talent in the developer studio, plus market analysis and the deployment of any existing code base or intellectual property. Production requires publisher investment (who may or may not also be the developer) or venture capital, and then the application of production skill which is often a years-long undertaking. At the distribution phase, options are digital (growing), physical (shrinking) and different platforms (consoles, online stores including mobile). Marketing is critical in distribution of a game; this is where the game reaches users. Monetisation of a game depends on subscriptions, unit purchases, in-game purchases and advertising, and other channels of IP exploitation (such as TV and movies.) The outputs are cash flow and the capacity to sell the business. Artificial Intelligence powers gaming in automated level generation and game scaling, autonomous non-playing-character generation and many other ways. Meanwhile games have been used to develop many fundamental technologies of AI which are being scaled out to other fields from medicine to nuclear fusion.
