A graphic representation of relative publisher sizes in the gaming
industry, using The Witcher 2 creator CD Project as a unit of
measurement.
There's a conventional wisdom in the gaming industry that splits
companies into haves and have-nots. There are a handful of big,
successful companies, and a broad underclass of upstart outfits on their
way up and stumbling giants trying to put off their inevitable demise.
For gamers who don't need to follow the financial ins-and-outs of the
industry, sorting companies into a handful of categories instead of
digging to see if the reality of the situation matches their perceptions
can be a helpful, time-saving exercise. The thing is, sometimes the
companies we consider to be big players really aren't as big as we
thought. And those rising stars (or companies with flagging fortunes)
may not be quite as small in stature as they first appeared.
With that in mind, we looked to rank a selection of the most influential
players in the industry by the metric that most clearly indicates
size: revenue. We went through each company's financial earnings
reports and took the net revenues each reported for its most recently
completed fiscal year, then ranked them accordingly. While the
information itself was interesting, it was easy to lose any sense of
perspective when faced with a table of equally unfathomable numbers. To
remedy that, we decided a visual representation of the company sizes
was called for, so we used the smallest company on our list, The
Witcher 2 developer CD Project, as our baseline unit of measurement.
For example, CD Projekt posted $39.36 million in net revenues for its
last fiscal year, so Take-Two's $825.8 million in revenues was
equivalent to a little less than 21 CD Projekts, while one could fit
the Polish studio into Sony's $79.1 billion in revenues more than 2,009
times over.
That brings up a significant caveat. Like a number of companies on this
list, Sony's business extends far beyond gaming. And because not all
of these companies report the revenues of their gaming business
separate from all other interests, we couldn't accurately limit the
exercise to just game sales. That obviously means giants like Sony,
Microsoft, and Time-Warner will wind up dwarfing their more
gaming-focused counterparts, but it carries impacts on the smaller
scale outfits as well. For example, Konami operates a series of fitness
centers in Japan, while Sega Sammy manufactures pachinko machines, and
Namco Bandai boasts a significant toy business built on brands like
Gundam, Power Rangers, and Tamagotchi.
Even taking that into account, there were some surprises in the data.
GameStop is bigger than Nintendo. The House of Mario had a
particularly rough year revenue-wise, but did you realize the specialty
retailer brought in more money than Nintendo by a cool $1 billion?
GameStop also brought in more than Activision Blizzard and Electronic
Arts combined, underscoring just how much weight the chain has to throw
around when it comes to protecting its used game business.
THQ topped Take-Two. Most of the news surrounding THQ of late
has been grim, but the publisher behind Saints Row and the WWE
wrestling games brought in more money last year than the outfit behind
Grand Theft Auto and BioShock. Of course, Take-Two didn't have major
releases in either of those series last year, but L.A. Noire and NBA
2K12 are nothing to sneeze at.
Zynga's still fairly small. In 2010, a report from SharesPost
put the social gaming company's total value at $5.51 billion, topping
that of Electronic Arts. Despite the hype for Zynga's initial public
offering, the free-to-play Facebook publisher isn't yet posting the sort
of sales one might expect from such a buzz-worthy brand. However, it
is growing at an impressive clip. Last year, the company posted $1.14
billion in revenues, nearly doubling the $597 million it brought in the
year before.
EA and Activision Blizzard are outsized by Sega Sammy and Namco Bandai.
While EA and Activision Blizzard tend to come up when gamers think of
the world's biggest third-party publisher, the two Japanese publishers
draw considerable income provided by pachinko, arcade operations, and
toys.
