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Why Playing Video Games Can Actually Be Good for Your Health Tessa Berenson

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There are 1.23 billion people worldwide who spend an hour a day, on average, playing video games. Jane McGonigal thinks this is a great thing. McGonigal is a game designer and author, and she spoke at The Nantucket Project Saturday morning about why she believes playing video games is good for people and for the world. The first speaker of the day, McGonigal took the stage on a warm, breezy morning in Nantucket in front of an audience still sipping their espressos and Nantucket Nectars from breakfast. (Tom Scott, the founder of Nantucket Nectars, started the annual speaker series on the island.) McGonigal began her talk by acknowledging that there are some statistics about gaming that are, admittedly, discouraging: worldwide, we spend 1.75 billion minutes a day playing Candy Crush. Surely there must be something better to do with that time? But throughout her talk, the designer explained to the audience how to rethink their perceptions of what gaming is. When pe
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Game of War’s paying players spent an average of $550 on its in-app purchases in 2015

Game of War players are spending a ton of money, but traditional console gamers still spend more than their mobile counterparts. The average paying player on mobile spends $86.50 per year on in-app purchases, according to research firm Slice Intelligence . That’s right behind the $91.58 average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) for consoles. That’s a difference of a measly $5, and it explains why developers are aggressively pursuing the smartphone and tablet market. Additionally, certain games have shown that dedicated players will spend way more than that average. Game of War: Fire Age from developer Machine Zone draws an average of $549.69 per paying user. That’s more than any other mobile game, and that’s enough to make the game one of the top-grossing apps in the $34.8 billion gaming business on iOS and Android. A $550 annual average is insane, but Machine Zone has definitely mastered certain aspects of getting people with a lot of money to part with huge chunks of it.
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Mobile games booming as global games market hits $108.9B in 2017

Newzoo's latest quarterly update for its Global Games Market Report forecasts that the global games business will grow to $108.9 billion this year, with mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) generating a lion's share of the revenue. Newzoo called mobile the "most lucrative segment" while noting that it should grow 19% year-on-year to $46.1 billion, which would represent 42% of the market. By 2020, mobile gaming will represent just over half of the total games market, the firm said. While mobile includes tablet gaming revenues, the sector is clearly dominated by smartphones. Of the $46 billion expected this year, Newzoo said $35.3 billion will come from smartphone gaming; at the same time, tablet unit sales "have plummeted," Newzoo commented. Even so, there are 280 million tablets being actively used worldwide, contributing more than $10 billion to worldwide gaming revenues. One of the big reasons for mobile's continued growth is the r
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