The cloud-based global game-delivery company Pando Networks recently distributed a press-release containing a telling infographic about the growth of global gaming as seen through the eyes of their network. Some countries have seen faster growth into using their network to acquire games than others—for example over the past three years European downloads have risen by 1025% and Latin America has seen a 595% increase.
Overall, the infographic shows that online gaming downloads via the Pando Network service have increased 450% since 2009.
We should keep in mind that this data is based entirely on Pando Network’s userbase—about 70 million clients since 2009 with about 38 million over 2011 alone—it only represents the behavior of the consumers of that service. Over the past few years, Pando have been vying to be a distribution network for the free-to-play massively online multiplayer gaming industry and they’ve been slowly but surely inserting themselves.
Better data would be to see how much individual games had grown through the Pando Networks verses one another. However, even across 38 million individuals in 2011 alone, these increases in using cloud-based networks to download and update free-to-play social games is a telling statistic about how gaming is reaching every part of the globe.
Today, in fact, social-MMO publisher, Zynga threw open their doors with a $1 billion IPO; and earlier this week Nexon went to Tokyo for a $1.2 billion IPO. Showing not only the staying power of free-to-play gaming that uses freemium microtransactioned monetization for virtual items but that the industry is growing and startups are billowing up in its wake.
[...] We’ve seen cloud-technology affect digital segments across the board; in fact cloud-distributed gaming has been seeing a lot of expansion with a 40% increase over the past few years. [...]