Dmitry Filatov, CEO of the Narwhal gaming accelerator, published some statistics on gaming companies on his DogDog telegram channel. He tried to calculate how many video game-related organizations there are in the world right now: publishers, game development studios, outsourcing studios, platforms, game investors and others. He also looked at which countries their headquarters are located in.
Distribution of gaming companies by country, pie chart
According to Filatov, when collecting data, he relied on information from public sources. In particular, he took information from lists published online with companies and LinkedIn. It is important to note that this is not a large-scale study, but an attempt to study the market situation.
Filatov counted 5.3 thousand gaming companies in total.
Top 5 countries by the number of gaming companies registered in them:
1. USA — 23.2%;
2. China — 11.7%;
3. Great Britain — 6%;
4. Russia — 5.4%;
5. Canada/Germany — 4.2% each.
Distribution of gaming companies by country, dotted chart
The data provided by Filatov is most likely greatly underestimated. According to estimates by the American Association of Software and Game Manufacturers (ESA), there are now more than 11 thousand companies registered in the United States alone that work with video games. However, if we leave only publishers, developers and manufacturers of gaming hardware in the statistics, then this number will decrease to 1,249 organizations.
Also, according to the European Game Developers Federation (EGDF), in 2021 there were more than 5,700 publishers and game development studios in the European Union. It's hard to say how many companies there are in China, but there are much more than a couple thousand of them. At the end of 2021, the Chinese state-owned Securities Daily newspaper wrote that 14 thousand video game-related companies closed in the country during the year due to the freezing of licenses for publishing games.