Big in Tehran: Inside Iran’s $140M console and PC market

I’ve chalked up 2015 revenue for the PC and console games market in Iran to approximately $140 million, based on research firm Newzoo’s latest data, and project it to grow to $167 million this year. But the majority of this is hard to measure or accurately track because it lurks in gray and black markets due to decades of sanctions and the absence of official distribution channels.

Gameguise ran a triple-A gamer study this month to help us shed light on this murky landscape. Between January 25 and January 28, 743 respondents completed the survey on our channel on Line, the popular messaging app in Iran. They all qualified as owning a game console, while 70 percent of the sample, or 1,875 respondents, disqualified. Over 80 percent accessed the survey via a VPN partly due to the fact that the survey platform we’re using, Survey Gizmo, is blocked by some ISPs.