Passage 2
Old stereotypes die hard.Picture a video-game player and you will likely imagine a teenage boy, by himself, compulsively hammering away at a game involving rayguns and aliens that splatter when blasted. Ten years ago that might have borne some relation to reality. But today a gamer is as likely to be a middle-aged commuter playing "Angry Birds"on her smartphone. In America, the biggest market, the average game-player is 37 years old. Two-fifths are female
Over the past ten years the video-game industry has grown from a small business to a huge, mainstream one. With global sales of S56 billon in 2010, it is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry. Despite the downturn, it is growing by almost 9% a year.
Is this success due to luck or skill? The answer maters, because the rest of the entertainment industry has tended to treat gaming as being a lucky beneficiary of broader technological changes. Video gaming, unlike music, film or television, had the luck to be born digital. In fact, there is plenty for old media to learn.
Video games have certainly been swept along by two forces: demography and technology. The first gaming generation the children of the 1970s and early 1980s-is now over 30. Many sill love gaming, and can afford to spend far more on it now. Meanwhile rapid improvements in computing power have allowed game designers to offer experiences that are now often more cinematic than the cinema.
But even granted this good fortune, the game-makers have been clever. They have reached out to new customers with new methods. They have branched out into education, corporate training and even warfare, and have embraced digital downloads and mobile devices with enthusiasm. Though big-budget games are still popular, much of the growth now comes from "casual"games that are simple, cheap and playable in short bursts on mobile phones or in web browsers.
The industry has excelled in a particular area-pricing. In an era when people are disinclined to pay for content on the web, games publishers were quick to develop "freemium" models, where you rely on non-paying customers to build an audience and then extract cash only from a fanatical few.
As gaming comes to be seen as just another medium, its tech-savvy approach could provide a welcome shot in the arm for existing media groups.
The two examples in Paragraph 1 are used to illustrate that________.
