The DeanBeat: The joys and perils of gaming in 2018

The game industry is booming, with global revenues expected to hit $125.4 billion in 2018, according to market researcher Newzoo. But if you look under the surface, not everything is great. We can see winners and losers in various markets, regions, platforms, and game categories. We’re going to explore the state of games at our upcoming GamesBeat Summit 2018 event in just 10 days, and we hope we’ll come out of it with real perspective.

It’s great to see resilience across so many categories, like esports, augmented reality, virtual reality, consoles, PC games, and mobile. If any one of those sectors weakens, the other can pick up slack. Economically, that’s good for any region, whether it’s an emerging market or the U.S. But the U.S. got a dose of bad news this week from the job site Indeed.com, which applied analytics to its trove of big data on game jobs.