Have M-rated games grown their market share? | 10 Years Ago This Month

gamesindustry.biz:

The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

If it seems like just yesterday we ran our monthly retrospective column, well, it was.

But May of 2013 played host to the Xbox One reveal event, a debacle that consumed the column entirely on its own, leaving little room for other subjects like the seemingly evergreen one we're going to talk about today: violence.

A decade ago, I wrote an editorial on the game industry's then-increasing reliance on violent games.

The key evidence was that M-rated games had been declining as a percentage of games released each year, but significantly growing the amount of industry revenues they represented. In 2011, only about 9% of games had an M-rating, but they collectively represented almost 27% of revenues in the US.

The Entertainment Software Association stopped reporting on each rating's market share after the 2011 figures were put out, likely because it was unclear just how much higher that M-rated market share could go. The industry was still a popular scapegoat among many politicians, and even a Supreme Court decision affirming free speech protections for games wouldn't stop them from being used as a cynical distraction from gun control.

So when I saw that editorial in putting together this month's 10 Years Ago column, I got curious about how those numbers would look today.

M-rated