The flood of new gaming consoles and new game titles to Americans for the Christmas season hints at the size of the video gaming industry:

Global videogame revenue is expected to surge 20% to $179.7 billion in 2020, according to IDC data, making the videogame industry a bigger moneymaker than the global movie and sports industries combined. The global film industry reached $100 billion in revenue for the first time in 2019, according to the Motion Picture Association, while PwC estimated global sports would bring in more than $75 billion in 2020…

The videogame industry has boomed in recent years because of the variety of ways to play games. Gone are the days when all one had to track were console sales and games sold for their respective consoles and PCs. With the rise of digital-copy game sales, mobile games, in-app purchase freemium games, cross-platform games that aren’t limited to a specific console, streaming game services like Microsoft’s Game Pass, games-as-a-subscription models, and online distribution services like Steam, along with varying levels of transparency, anyone wanting to make apples-to-apples comparisons encounters an unwieldy fruit basket.

While console sales will get a boost from new versions, that’s not the biggest chunk of the industry, nor the fastest-growing. The biggest gain is expected to come from mobile gaming, with China playing a big role in smartphone and tablet gaming revenue, Ward said. Excluding in-game ad revenue, world-wide mobile gaming revenues are expected to surge 24% from a year ago, to $87.7 billion.

The gamification of the world is well underway.

Seriously, it is interesting to compare the status of videogames compared to the two industries mentioned in the article: movies and sports. These are established industries with prominent actors around the world. They have been established for decades. Videogames, on the other hand, are more recent – only several decades in the hands of the global public – and still have negative connotations for many (too violent, a waste of time, played only by a certain segment of the population, etc.). Since videogames are big business and part of their spread is due to the smartphone, which many have, will videogames have a different status in a few years?