The video game industry, it's a very lucrative business and let's face it, a very large portion of our society uses it's products some even daily, but what is it exactly?

The video game industry is an umbrella term to describe the various jobs and areas that encompass the development, marketing, and actual sale of video games. A few headliners in this industry would be Microsoft, (Xbox 360) Sony, (the Playstation 3 and the PSP) and Nintendo (the Wii and the Nintendo DSi).

The video game industry has grown into something absolutely huge in a relatively small amount of time, if you think about it, as in only roughly 40 years it has grown from a small hobby culture of computer games in the 70's to the burgeoning industry that it is here in 2010, with three major companies constantly battling to release the next big-selling system. It is somewhat similar to the music industry in how it works between developers and publishers, with the overt difference that recent technology has rendered it much easier and inexpensive to produce high-quality music on your own, while it has had precisely the opposite effect on the gaming industry, as a great deal of time, money, and equipment is required to keep up with the graphic, interactivity, and general power of the consoles, giving publishers a great deal of power, and leading to occasional accusations of poor treatment of the industry's development talent.

Computer gaming is a different animal altogether however, with a unified control method (the keyboard and mouse) and things like Flash making creating small, accessible games quite easy, and the internet making getting games out to the audience easier than ever before. There are many Indie (independent) developers forming small companies and releasing games through the internet in hopes of growing into larger ones, or perhaps just for the sake of making games and getting noticed by publishers and gamers alike. Also worthy of note, the computer/gaming company Microsoft is also assisting Indie developers by including an entire inexpensive section for Indie games on its Xbox Live marketplace.  Video game store franchise opportunities like Play N Trade are growing the video game industry exponentially. 

All in all the video games industry has grown, and it will likely continue to grow as the processing power of the consoles and of computers continues to do so, and as for how they will be controlled, who knows? After all, Nintendo has captured the market with motion-sensitive controls on the Wii, and there's no telling what the industry will end up with given enough time.