The serious games industry: a quick overview

The serious games "industry" is not simple, not uniform, and not even always an "industry." Here's a few brief statements that will help you start to get a handle on what the serious games category is all about ...

Diverse marketplace

First of all, there's an extremely diverse marketplace for serious games. In fact, it's probably not accurate to say "marketplace;" the reality is that there are many niches for serious games which are served by entirely different types of companies and organizations, including non-profits and open-source.

Examples:

• US military
• Pre-school (formal and informal)
• K-12 education
• Higher education
• Public sector
• Private industry
• Social activism

These are wildly varying spaces in which to create and release software/courseware ... so it's not surprising that the types of companies or organizations that have arisen to create serious games are also wildly varying and may not play nicely together.

Complex partnerships

Not only are the organizations in the serious games marketplace diverse, they are linked up in complex (but interesting) ways.

For example, imagine you are an e-learning company executive targeting the medical industry. Simulations are important serious game training tools in doctor and nurse training. Investigating the market, you might run across compelling simulations such as Pulse, which is being developed by a university that has gotten a grant from the public sector in the form of the US government. Tracing the money flow a little farther, you'd find that US military, in the form of the Office of Naval Research, has supplied the $10 million grant to fund the project. Digging just a little deeper, you would find that while the university is running the project and a hospital foundation is testing it and the US military is funding it ... a private company (BreakAway) is actually building it. Welcome to the competition.

Poor market size definition

There are not many tracking studies specifically of serious games. However, industry pundits have estimated the market size at a minimum of $150 million. That's based on a PriceWaterHouseCoopers analysis released in summer 2007 titled "Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2007-2011." (The report is $1000, but the link above goes to a Business Week article discussing some of the key findings.) Ben Sawyer, a co-director of the Serious Games Initiative, had access to the report and speculated that "there's no reason it can't be a billion-dollar market within a decade or sooner."

The important-to-remember reality, however, is that estimating industry sales even in simpler markets like retail is more of an art than a science, and estimating industry size in an emerging global space with complex private/public partnerships and a poorly-defined category is perhaps farther along the continuum in the direction of magic. The one reality we can pull from this is that the market is growing. Exactly how much and how fast is a matter for debate.

Ambiguous category

It's not entirely clear to all people in the serious games industry what actually fits within the "serious games" category. Do "advergames" like the ones Colgate produces to teach kids about dental health count? When Arnold Schwarzenegger puts the Dance Dance Revolution video game in California schools as part of a health and fitness initiative, does that fit the bill? What about Carmen SanDiego? And Math Blaster? And Reader Rabbit?

Some serious games stakeholders prefer to reserve the category for immersive virtual worlds. Others don't wish to include applications built in platforms like Flash that have not traditionally been seen as gaming platforms. But this is a topic that we'd like your input on ... please tell us what you think fits in the category. We're quite willing to stretch the concept ... but probably not so far as to include Dance Dance Revolution!

Multiple media

There isn't any one media or delivery platform for serious games. Desktop applications delivered on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM have certainly loomed large in the history of serious games. But one can easily see emerging training built on massively multiplayer online gaming platforms such as Second Life. Others have been created in Flash - see Turn It All Off, for example. And one could easily argue that a serious game does not require anything that we habitually think of as "technology." Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has been doing scenario planning (which involves complex simulations similar to war games) for almost 40 years.

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Directory of Serious Games

If you're interested in learning more about what kinds of serious games there are, check this directory of serious games. It lists over a hundred serious games.