2015
Company
Documents about 2015
Japan Market Report 2025
Newzoo's Japan market report, prepared for UKIE's Virtual Trade Mission: Japan, helps game businesses of all sizes understand and navigate one of the world's most distinctive and competitive markets.
- Japan generates 9.1% of global games revenue from only 2.2% of the global player base, with an average revenue per user of $223 compared to $145 in the UK.
- International stakeholders have a $2.5 to $3.0 billion market opportunity when excluding mobile and Nintendo platforms, which currently command 70% of console hardware dominance.
- Japanese gamers prioritize narrative depth, character design, and solo play, contrasting with Western preferences for open worlds, high-end graphics, and competitive multiplayer.
Souls‑likes: From Niche to Mainstay
Souls-likes have moved from a niche subgenre to a mainstream pillar of game design, and this Video Game Insights analysis examines how developer class, region and player geography shape commercial success.
- The souls-like genre has shifted from indie-dominated to AAA-led, with AAA and AA publishers now accounting for over 70% of estimated units sold on Steam.
- Chinese gamers represent approximately 47% of the global souls-like audience, significantly outpacing the United States at 15% and Germany at 5%.
- APAC developers have surged to control roughly 80% of the genre's development share as of 2025, building on a foundation established by Japanese studios.
Championing the 25 Retailers and Digital Services Who Connect Music, Video and Games Creators with UK Fans Yearbook
The United Kingdom’s entertainment market reached a historic milestone in 2024, achieving a record valuation of £12.0 billion.
- The UK entertainment market reached a record £12.0 billion valuation in 2024, marking twelve consecutive years of growth and a 50% increase since 2019.
- Digital services and streaming now dominate the industry, accounting for 93% of total revenue, with subscription models driving over 75% of consumer spending.
- Video is the largest sector at £5.0 billion, fueled by an 8.3% rise in Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) to £4.46 billion, which successfully offset the decline in physical media.
UK Games Fund Enters 10th Year
The UK Games Fund marks its tenth year of operation, reflecting on a decade of sustained support for the domestic video game development sector.
- The UK Games Fund has supported over 400 indie game projects with more than £20 million in grant funding since its establishment in 2015.
- The organization has conducted 15 rounds of open calls for applications from developers over the past nine years.
- The Content Fund, launched approximately one year ago, has received applications from over 300 developers seeking grants ranging from £50,000 to £150,000.
Renewing Systems Analysis: The Impact of Game-Based Learning on Repeating Students
A South African study examines whether a game-based, inverted-classroom intervention can improve outcomes for students repeating a Systems Analysis and Design course.
- Repeating students in a game-based, inverted-classroom intervention (2015–2018) outperformed prior cohorts and their peers, with average final marks rising roughly 8–12% over earlier years.
- Pass rates for the intervention group ranged from 65.9% to 76.9%, exceeding the combined class pass rates, and course satisfaction reached 89.5% in 2015 versus 78.3% for the comparison group.
- The intervention separated repeating students from first-time students and used quiz games, a "Happy Hour" review format, and court-style expert-witness sessions carried out within project groups.
Building the 'Minecraft' Creator Platform Block-by-Block
Minecraft has successfully transformed from a sandbox game into a professional creator ecosystem by formalizing user-generated content through the Bedrock platform.
- Since launching in 2015, the Minecraft Marketplace has generated over $500 million in gross revenue and facilitated more than 1.7 billion downloads, supporting a professional creator ecosystem.
- Mojang Studios categorizes its user base into players, hobbyists, and professional creators, with the latter group transitioning from intrinsic motivation to business-oriented content production.
- To address the limitations of the C++ Bedrock codebase, Mojang is developing a formal Creator API and tooling to match the extensibility previously only available through Java decompilation.
Revisiting the Aura of Token in Museological Puzzle Adventure Gamebook Migong
This paper examines the Migong series of puzzle adventure gamebooks published by the Forbidden City Publishing House, focusing on how historically themed physical tokens function as game items that evoke what Walter Benjamin termed "aura."
- The Migong series' first title, Migong: Ruyi Linlang Tuji, was crowdfunded in October 2018 against a goal of 100,000 RMB, ultimately raising 20.2 million RMB and pre-selling 122,000 copies by late November 2018.
- The series is built on historically themed physical tokens, such as Qing court paintings, a Qianlong Tongbao coin, and Yanpi Xuan paper, which players observe, touch, place, and manipulate during puzzle-solving.
- The authors draw on Walter Benjamin's concept of "aura" to argue that analog puzzle play can restore a sense of "here and now" immediacy within a mechanically reproduced medium, offering a counterpoint to digital environments where authenticity is diminished.
Fringe Game Craft: An Exploration of Fantasy Consoles and Exotic Game Tools
This experimental web-journal submission, authored by independent designer Cuauhtemoc Moreno for DiGRA 2024, explores fantasy consoles and unconventional game engines and the hobbyist, artist, and modder communities that sustain them.
- The report argues that fantasy consoles and unconventional game engines deserve recognition as legitimate sites of game creation, positioned outside commercial production and sustained by hobbyist, artist, and modder communities.
- The author, independent designer Cuauhtemoc Moreno, grounds the work in roughly twenty years of personal game design and development experience rather than systematic data collection.
- The submission contains no survey sample, quantitative statistics, or formal empirical methodology; its method is reflective and practice-based, drawing on personal portfolio work and hands-on tinkering.
Demystify the Concept of Beginner Village in Chinese Role-Playing Games: A Discourse Analysis
This discourse analysis examines the concept of the "beginner village" in Chinese role-playing games, a term commonly applied to the starting areas of these games even when those areas depict modern or futuristic settings.
- The term "beginner village" in Chinese RPGs emerged only with the rise of Chinese MMORPGs at the start of the 21st century, and was initially used for starting areas even in modern or futuristic settings.
- In its early MMORPG-era meaning, the beginner village denoted historical, low-technology settings and bustling social hubs with large player communities, helping detach players from reality and immerse them in the game world.
- From the 2010s onward, game journalism extended the term to the starting areas of single-player RPGs, shifting its emphasis from the village itself to the beginner contrasted with the skilled player.
Terribly Bored Lizards: Resonating with the Captive Animal in Jurassic World: Evolution
This document is a scholarly paper from the Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 that uses textual analysis and Animal Studies and Affect Studies approaches to examine how Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier, 2018) represents captive animals.
- The paper argues that Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier, 2018) uses constrained, repetitive park-management systems so that players grow bored with the dinosaurs rather than encountering them 'in themselves,' and it reads this monotony as a deliberate design choice that creates a space of 'resonance' with the nonhuman.
- Critics frequently described Evolution as repetitious and boring, noting that dinosaurs nap more often than they fight, escapes are routinised, and players must balance a narrow set of happiness parameters for animals and visitors.
- The author characterises the dinosaur as an ambivalent figure that resists Janski's typology of game animals as opponents, background assets, or resources, instead being simultaneously enemy, tool, actual animal, and speculative construction.
The Empowering Playground: The Rise of Feminist Ideology in Female-Leading Indie Game Community
This paper examines how feminist ideology and female-oriented values are expressed in contemporary Chinese indie games produced within Chengguang Games, a female-led visual novel community and distribution platform often described as the world's largest indie game community by title count.
- The study analyzes 37 titles from the 2022 Hall of Fame Works on Chengguang Games, a female-led visual novel community and distribution platform described as the world's largest indie game community by title count, with plans to extend the examination to works from 2015 through 2023.
- Its central argument is that the Chengguang community has become an "empowering playground" for female players and creators, shaped by evolving narrative autonomy and feminist consciousness.
- The research takes a paratextual approach, analyzing creators' own statements and commentaries rather than focusing primarily on business models or individual titles as prior research on the platform did.
Playgrounds of Authority: Space, Power, and Agency in Dying Light
This paper, by Will McKeown and Poppy Wilde of Birmingham City University, applies Deleuzoguattarian frameworks to questions of authority, agency, and spatiality in videogames, using the open-world zombie survival game Dying Light (Techland 2015) as its case study.
- The paper argues that Deleuze-informed game scholarship has framed agency only from the player's position, and proposes instead that authority is distributed across the whole virtual game-space, including items, enemies, buildings, landscapes, traversal methods, and non-player characters.
- Authority in Dying Light is described as a non-hierarchical, rhizomatic network, where progression, enemy types, difficulty settings, and weapon durability together produce a shifting balance between human and zombie rather than a fixed hierarchy.
- The authors map the game world along a striated-to-smooth space continuum: daytime streets read as fixed and rule-governed, while rooftops become open, contested terrain once fast-climbing Viral zombies appear.