Video Game Industry - A Giant in Making

The video game industry (formally referred to as interactive entertainment) is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sale of video games. It encompasses dozens of job disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide.
Modern personal computers owe many advancements and innovations to the gaming industry: sound cards, graphics cards and 3D graphic accelerators, CD ROM and DVD-ROM drives, Unix and CPUs are a few of the more notable improvements. Unix in particular was developed in part so that the programmers could play a space traveling game.
Modern games are among the most demanding of applications on PC resources. Many of the high powered personal computers are purchased by gamers who want the fastest equipment to power the latest cutting-edge games.

Early on, development costs were minimal, and video games could be quite profitable. Games developed by a single programmer, or by a small team of programmers and artists, could sell hundreds of thousands of copies each. Many of these games only took a few months to create, so developers could release several titles each year. Thus, publishers could often be generous with benefits, such as royalties on the games sold. Many early game publishers started from this economic climate, such as Origin Systems, Sierra Entertainment, Capcom, Activision and Electronic Arts.

As computing and graphics power increased, so too did the size of development teams, as larger staffs were needed to address the ever increasing graphical and programming complexities. Now budgets can easily reach millions of dollars, even if middleware and pre-built game engines are used. Most professional games require one to three years to develop, further increasing the strain on budgets.

Some developers are turning to alternative production and distribution methods, such as online distribution, to reduce costs
Video game arcades are still relatively popular in Japan; for every arcade game released in the US, nine are released in Japan. The history of the Japanese arcade is very significant in the story of the decline of the American arcade, and in the shape of game design in general.
Today, the video game industry has a major impact on the economy through the sales of major systems and games such as, Grand Theft Auto IV, which took in over USD$500 million in sales during its opening week.The game's income was more than the opening weekend of Spider-Man 3 and the original title holder for a video game Halo 3.Many individuals have also benefited from the economic success of video games including the former chairman of Nintendo and Japan's richest man: Hiroshi Yamauchi.