Although video games – and with them the entire gaming industry – may be associated by some only with entertainment for teenagers (and, let's be honest, also for those “big kids”), in reality we are talking about a serious business worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
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💰 Gaming is big business – the global gaming market is worth $187 billion a year, surpassing the film and music industries combined.
🚀 Space technology – futuristic computers, AI supercomputers, anime-inspired mice and keyboards, illuminated cases that look like pieces of ice.
🤖 AI at your fingertips – presentations of mini-supercomputers rendering cyberpunk portraits or instantly summarizing YouTube videos.
The abstract was generated using our proprietary AI prompt.
Today, the gaming industry is one of the fastest growing fields of technology, as shown by the Computex trade fair in Taiwan, where the expo halls were filled to the brim with colorful products – from graphics cards, through mice, to cases, and all this in an exceptionally spectacular, if not even “Hollywood” entourage.
Every meter, and there were about 80 thousand of them in total, almost 5,000 stands and 1,500 exhibitors, all of it shouted: “Gaming is king!” and it really looks like it is, because it was in this hall that I got lost several times. No wonder, for four days, the corridors were flooded with a crowd of over 86 thousand merchants, engineers and journalists from all over the world. Among them were streamers, YouTubers, and also from every side of the photographed cosplayers and serious gentlemen in suits, who negotiated contracts in this colorful and shiny environment.
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It has to be “rich” or not at all
By far the most impressive and gaming-themed stand (read: the most RGB-lit) was provided by Gigabyte and its gaming brand Aorus, where the centerpiece was, I don't know, a rocket or a small space station? It was definitely a cosmic sight.
In addition to new graphics cards and PC cases, the largest queues formed for the “AI-TOP Cluster Wall” – four connected ATOMs, i.e. mini-supercomputers the size of an Xbox with about 120 times the power of an average ultrabook, rendering a portrait of a visitor on the fly in a cyberpunk style.
A little “sneak peak” of what the world's largest computer fair looks like. Another world, 22nd century. pic.twitter.com/zOuNxVCh14
— Aleksander Ogrodnik (@AJOgrodnik) May 29, 2025
A few meters away, a long queue snaked to the “GIGAPOD.” This was not another “intelligent photo booth,” but a full-size section of the server room, where models like ChatGPT operate today. In one rack, flooded with fluorescent green coolant, Gigabyte packed the latest Nvidia HGX Blackwell and AMD MI300X GPU processors. The total power of the installation exceeded 300 kW, and in terms of AI operations, this gave about 30 PFLOPS—nearly 900 times more than the average gamer’s PC.
In practice, it looked like this: visitors scanned a QR code, entered a query – for example, “summarize this 15-minute YouTube video” – and watched as the cluster threw out the finished text in a dozen or so seconds. The result: instead of a simple hardware demonstration, the audience received tangible proof that a “cloud in a box” could do what until recently required halls full of servers.
Anime mice, hentai keyboards and ice-like cases
If you dropped by COMPUTEX just to “touch” peripherals, you could get stuck there all day. More than 350 mouse, keyboard and pad companies were spread out across several hundred stands – from huge Razer and Logitech pavilions to micro-boxes with custom-printed keycaps. In one row, the “anime mice” shone: ultralight Pulsar and Finalmouse rodents, hand-airbrushed with the heroines of the “Demon Slayer” series; in the next, “hentai edition” keyboards from Ducky and Akko, with 3D-carved, pastel keycaps.
Cases also had their moment: the futuristic “ICE-TOWER” shapes from In Win and the AORUS C500 Panoramic ICE from Gigabyte, built from semi-transparent acrylic and illuminated so that the whole thing looked like a piece of ice floe.
photo: Aleksander Ogrodnik / Bankier.pl
In addition, headphone stands, pads with active hand cooling and hundreds of prototypes that still smelled of a 3D printer. In short: if something can be connected, clicked or inserted into a computer, at this fair it was in at least thirty color variants – a gaming Disneyland in full, RGB-rainbow edition.
Gaming is not just about “curves”, it is about dollars, euros, yens and huge ones at that
Hardware, peripherals, video games, consoles, mobile games and e-sports. All of this adds up to a stack of banknotes for the industry, and a big one at that. A total of over $187 billion – that's how much, according to Newzoo, the global video game market generated in 2024. A lot? Not much? For comparison, let's look at another entertainment sector, namely cinema and music, which, taken together, are still far behind. The global box office in 2024 closed at around $33 billion, while the phonographic industry generated revenues of almost $30 billion, which is over $100 billion less than the gaming industry. And that's 2024. In 2025, looking at the scale of the fair itself, but also how dynamically this industry is developing, we can safely assume that the market will exceed the magical barrier of $200 billion.
If the global gaming market is $187 billion, then almost every seventh dollar goes through Tencent's coffers. In 2024, the Chinese giant's gaming segment brought in RMB 197.7 billion, or about $27.3 billion, which is about 30 percent of the company's total revenue. For comparison: the entire PlayStation “stable” from Sony, together with hardware, is aiming for $29-30 billion, and Microsoft with its Xbox, but also games, and that's after absorbing Activision Blizzard, for about $22 billion.
Today, games are Hollywood, the stadium, and Wall Street all rolled into one. So if someone still treats gaming as entertainment for “big kids,” they should look at the counter: $187 billion and counting. That's how much the world costs today, where a keyboard is a movie ticket, a controller is a season ticket to the stadium, and every skin in the game is an action on the stock exchange of emotions, as well as a real action on the stock exchange, for example, on the Steam Market. Gaming is not the future of pop culture. He is already its main shareholder.
And how do we fare in all this?
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