Me when I find some fascinating charts:
It’s a great one showing a few things:
– Social Media exploded. We all know when this happened and how we can’t stop.
– Audio (music and podcasts) is still huge. We forget about it because music is so everywhere for free.
– Games are last and barely grew in terms of consumption. Game production on the other hand, exploded.
I am still asking here and there what people play and it’s clear that 25-35 people don’t play games that much, social media is the main game. And if they play, they don’t want to mention it. Saying that you’re using [insert favorite social network] a lot is fine though. It’s interesting.
Slow gaming growth with supply exploding (500 new games a day on iOS, over a billion games available on Steam) means we’re going to hit some harder truth soon.
So when I see a vast excitement about VR, that is demanding a $2K investment upfront to properly enjoy it, cutting you off from the real world and even digital social interactions… Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, social media is making money thanks to games:
Interestingly it’s mostly in Asia. It’s confusing to see all those trends kind of cancelling each other out. The West is not into games like that so I wonder where revenue for WhatsApp and others will be coming from.
One last one that I find interesting:
The sharing experience doesn’t need to improve, it’s easy to share music. It’s just that people don’t want to do it. Why? I think because music is deeply personal. I might listen to the same song for an hour. I might listen to that very, very silly song by a very big artist. I might listen to something you can’t listen to for more than ten seconds. I might be listening to that artist because I don’t know her/him while everybody knows the lyrics to those songs. Music is personal. You share music with people in real life, live. In a notification center? It adds nothing to anyone.