The Open Gaming Alliance (OGA) announced plans to release an annual research report on the games industry at the end of March. This report contends that PC gaming is not just a growing industry, it’s an ever-expanding market that will grow from $26 billion in 2014 to $35 billion by 2018.

The report, prepared for OGA by market research firm DFC Intelligence, covers trends from 2014 and forecasts for the PC gaming industry worldwide through 2018.

“Much of the growth is driven by pure demographics. We continue to identify a core group of consumers for whom playing on the PC is a major pastime,” says DFC analyst David Cole. “This is, in fact, a fairly new demographic that skews highly male and is only increasing in buying power.”

The research cites esports and large multiplayer games as a strong focus for this gaming market trend and mentions freemium games such as League of Legends and World of Tanks as key indicators of market health. Riot Games develops and publishes LoL, which is a market leader on the esports circuit, drew 32 million viewers during championship finals in 2013; and WoT’s publisher Wargaming.net invested $10 million in 2014 into esports development.

Esports itself is a notable marker in the video games industry, as according to a SuperData report 71.5 million viewers tuned in to watch participants compete for over $25 million in prizes during 2013 alone. A study released by Eventbrite this year also showed that esports led players to become more engaged with the gaming community and spend more money on games.

“The recipe that keeps PC gaming on top is simple,” says OGA board member and Research Subcommittee chair, Matt Ployhar: “the platform is accessible to all markets, and especially so with the free-to-play and freemium content; the hardware continues to evolve with gamers’ lifestyles, offering more choice and freedom; and, due to the ubiquity of PC’s globally, it’s easier to share, communicate and be more sociable with friends and family.”

Ployhar also believes that these same influences tend to explain the dramatic rise of the esports market. Gaming exhibits huge growth in not just players, but people interested in entertainment by proxy from watching others watch games, which in turn feeds back into gamers spending money on gaming.

This is confirmed with the increases in stream viewership, such as on Twitch.tv which reached 100 million unique viewers per month in 2014, over twice as many as 45 million from 2013.

The OGA report also predicts a banner year for mobile gaming in phones and tablets, although not handhelds, with mobile gaming peeking above $30 billion in 2018.

This seems to match a recent trend with streaming as well where Twitch reported in 2014 that almost a third of viewers watched games on their phones. Although how those trends correlate it’s hard to say as mobile games do not tend to penetrate the esports market, which is dominated primarily by PC games.

Image credit: Public domain artwork from http://www.clker.com/clipart-1833.html; and Open Gaming Alliance