Serious Games : Enjeux, offre et marche: Enseignement, Formation, Sante, Information & Communication, Defense (3e e.)
Laurent Michaud, Julian Alvarez, Véronique Alvarez, Damien Djaouti · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2012
This study analyzes the different segments of the Serious Gaming market, based on detailed case studies and a systematic presentation of technologies, uses and professions, with a particular focus on the key stages of design, development and distribution. It also presents the technological and business outlook for each market segment.Serious Gaming (SG) lies at the crossroads of several disciplines: e-learning, IT, engineering, game environment design, communication and business expertise (health, energy, training, education...). It is the fruit of collaborative work combining the skills of these disciplines that leads to the creation of an “effective” SG. While there is no guarantee that a title will be a success, particularly if all these disciplines are involved in a project, any failure may be due to the absence of one of them.The SG sector is in the process of meeting the industrial challenges it faces. Its value chain is changing, particularly upstream of production, with the use of high-end tools (if deemed necessary). Quality is also gaining ground in production, thanks in particular to SG developers' growing awareness of the need to integrate business expertise (health, education, training, etc.) into their teams, as well as video game expertise (“game design”, “level design”, “animation”, “storytelling”, etc.). Platforms for hosting, distributing, marketing and exploiting SGs are also emerging, with the aim of structuring and pooling the downstream end of the value chain within a standardized framework.Like its predecessor, the video game, SG is a cross-platform sector. Mainly deployed on PCs, it will naturally be able to develop on connected TVs to reach less technology-savvy audiences, and on touch-screen tablets, the ideal complement to a fixed platform. It will take advantage of the Internet connection to integrate a social and multiplayer component into the gameplay, but also to better understand the use of the applications, possibly set them up remotely and evaluate the results in real time.Between 2009 and 2010, the volume of titles published fell by 33%. While demand may have been overestimated at a time when business was taking off, we believe that developers focused their efforts more on the quality of their work than on the volume of applications. While in terms of volume, all target sectors are affected by this decline, in relative terms, the healthcare and vocational training sectors are becoming more representative. This phenomenon can be explained by the suitability of business models for the services provided by EMS, their robustness, the maturity of the offering and the clear expression of needs. Nonetheless, business models are still being invented.According to IDATE, worldwide sales in the SG sector are expected to reach EUR 2.35 billion for all market segments combined in 2011. The United States alone accounts for over 70% of global revenues. There is considerable room for growth, since the reference markets (healthcare, training, education, etc.) represent cumulative worldwide sales of around 5,000 billion EUR.