Is the video game industry a net benefit or a cost to society? Does it do more harm than good? If you were to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the video game industry you would go about trying to quantify the economic benefits (job creation, research and development, etc) against the societal costs (addition, power consumption, etc).
From a qualitative perspective, I would image that the effect of the video game industry on societies would be somewhat similar to wars. Wars have a huge cost to society. They take up huge resources both in terms of labor and capital but more importantly is the destruction of human lives and the irreparable damage it can leave on its participants.
At the same time, wars have been known to accelerate the advancement of certain technologies and scientific discovery. Often, these advancements will have applications far beyond than just some wartime utility.
In the same vain, there are undoubtedly victims of the video gaming industry. Games are hyper-optimized to reward the user of playing and video game addiction is well recorded academically. Countless hours are spent daily on video games, that could otherwise have been deployed to more productive uses.
Yet, the video game industry is also a hotbed for technological advancement. There are countless examples of technologies that were originally developed for the gaming industry, which subsequently found application elsewhere. Slack – a public company with a $16 billion market capitalization as I write this – was originally developed as an internal chap application for a gaming company.
Cost-Benefit Analysis of the South Korean Digital Game Industry
In this cost-benefit analysis of the South Korean Gaming Industry, the researchers attempted to estimate the economic costs and benefits of the digital game industry. Addiction to digital games induces economic costs such as increase in crime, facilities investments for curbing addiction, increase in counselling costs and other welfare losses. The digital game industry in South Korea which is known to have one of the highest rates of game addiction.
The annual cost of game addiction is estimated to be approximately $3.5B while the annual benefit is approximately $24.3B ($3.7B for addicted user market). The proportion of the total costs to total benefits from the game industry is an alarming 14% (95% for addicted user market).
How to Value Stuff 