Here's how gaming will fuel rapid growth in the virtual reality market

There is a massive audience of gamers on both traditional consoles and mobile devices, and these people will be the first to opt for virtual reality headsets.

Mobile gaming activity spikes when focusing especially on younger age brackets and millennials, who will most likely be the target audience for VR headsets and VR gaming content. 

But VR will also have a huge opportunity in console gaming. The industry is anticipating the debut of Sony's Project Morpheus headset in 2016, which will pair with the company's flagship PlayStation 4. This will be the first headset available that pairs directly with a gaming console.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we size the gaming market in order to get a better sense of how big virtual reality gaming will be. We also take a look at the different types of VR headset technology now on the market, discuss which categories will win out, and look at several use cases for VR headsets, including gaming and other.

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Here are some key points about virtual reality's opportunity in the gaming market:

• There are 1.2 billion gamers worldwide, including nearly 1 billion mobile gamers alone. This creates a direct, addressable market for VR headsets.
• Mobile gaming, in particular, will drive most of the gaming revenue growth going forward. We estimate that global revenue from mobile gaming will hit roughly $50 billion by 2020, according to our estimates based off of New Zoo data. That's nearly double the $26 billion in revenue that mobile gaming is expected to pull in this year.
• There is already an installed base of about 30 million gaming console users. As of year-end 2014, Sony has shipped roughly 18.5 million PlayStation 4 units cumulatively, while Microsoft hit about 11 million cumulative Xbox One shipments.
• In 2013, Sony and Microsoft accounted for a combined 81% share of video game console shipments during the year. These two platforms are the most influential in the gaming space right now, and their influence will most likely dictate how VR is received among the larger gaming console community.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts annual shipments of VR headsets between 2015 and 2020.
• Sizes the market for VR headset shipments by revenue and anticipates how the VR headset average selling price will trend.
• Breaks down VR headset shipments by category, including traditional VR headsets, smartphone-mounted VR headsets, and gaming-console headsets. 
• Pinpoints the gaming console market as a key driver of demand for VR headsets.
• Discusses the opportunity for VR content creation in gaming, streaming video, and shopping.

To access the full report from BI Intelligence, sign up for a full-access 14-day trial here. Full-access members also gain access to new in-depth reports, hundreds of charts, as well as daily newsletters on the digital industry.

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