Online games are now played for over 60 minutes a day by over half of a billion people globally, says Jane McGonigal.

In the United States alone, that number is 183 million.

Ninety-nine percent of boys under 18 and 94 percent of girls under 18 say they play online flash games regularly.

On an average, young people will rack up 10 thousand hours of gaming by the time they reach age 21.

That is about the same amount of time that they will spend in their classrooms.

Over 5 million Americans are actually spending over 40 hours a week playing online games, that is the equivalent of the time spent at a full time job.

The NPD Group, a financial-analysis firm that tracks the sales of video games, says the U.S. games industry sold $6.71 billion worth of new games in 2012.

The top 10 best-selling games of 2012 were:

Call of Duty: Black Ops II (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)

Madden NFL 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV, Wii U)

Halo 4 (360)

Assassin’s Creed III (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)

Just Dance 4 (Wii, 360, Wii U, PS3)

NBA 2K13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSP, Wii U, PC)

Borderlands 2 (360, PS3, PC)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (360, PS3, Wii, PC)

Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Wii, 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSV, PC)

FIFA Soccer 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV, 3DS, Wii U, PSP)

FarmVille is really a highly-popular farming simulation social networking game produced by Zynga in 2009 2009.

FarmVille 2 was released in September 2012.

Wow holds the Guinness World Record for typically the most popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), with over 8 million subscribers by March 2013 (Wikipedia).

Another popular game is Clash of Clans, which is a combat strategy game.

Free games, also known as freemium (free + premium) games, is really a business model where the game is distributed for free, but the customer gets the option of investing in a variety of game enhancements.

This model has become popular on both smartphones and iPads.

Free games are downloaded much more readily than paid games.

The freemium model appears to be the trend of the future because most are becoming reluctant to cover a game before they utilize it.

Once a customer runs on the game, they’ll usually be willing to spend cash within that game if they think it is fun and engaging.

As an example of how the freemium model works, consider the free game Clash of Clans.

The objective of this game would be to create a clan, create a village for the clan, then train your warriors to safeguard your village from invaders.

You can download the game to your smartphone free of charge. Then, ringbet88 as you find this game fun and engaging, there are a myriad of available upgrades.

Sure, you can go on playing for free for as long as you like and slowly earn virtual “gems” to help you fund your clan project. Or you may make a purchase over your smartphone to increase the pace of acquiring gems.