We are in the digital age, and we can tell by looking around many places, one of them is the gifts that are given in these times.
Times change, as does our way of life. Anyone who has lived long enough has seen the changes the world has made as the years go by.
The biggest change is the avalanche brought by the age of technology. Many things changed forever and many evolved into new paths.
It is not difficult to pin down what has changed and what has not, but there is a place where we can easily say that modernity has given it a nice touch.
What do we give as Christmas presents for the most part? They are definitely not handmade toys or gifts, as one Betway study picks up. Now this is not a strict reality that rules out such gifts, we can still get a nice traditional gift, but the common practice goes the other way.
Since the early 1970s, technology has played an important role in how and what to give on vacation. The Polaroid camera was one of the first pieces of consumer technology to reach the masses, and the decades that followed saw similar trends.
It did not lose any momentum, the great sensation passed through other industries. The video game industry boomed in the 1980s with the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which sparked the Japanese company for a place in history.
Games have gained wide influence throughout the world. Fast forward 10 years and we would see Nintendo still at the top, getting its goldmine from the Gameboy, a device that defined an entire generation and spanned many more of the brand’s projects.
Even with something as traditional as a ‘card game’, there was an influence with video games, with Pokémon being the most popular in 1999.
The Asian giant began to see better competition with the arrival of new consoles that could match its sales. Sony launched the new ‘PlayStation’ and Microsoft the ‘Xbox’. They started to gain traction early on, but the big results came with the PS3 (4 million units sold only in the Christmas season in 2013) and the Xbox 360 (with 1.4 million sales around November 2005).
Today, the market is filled with more than just game consoles. There are many gadgets that can be gifted today. From an electronic assistant, Alexa to an Apple device that can go from an iPhone to an iPad and some Airpods. The options are endless.
Changes are inevitable, no matter how long we would like the ‘old days’ to last forever, time passes and things don’t stay the same, but the feeling of the gift is timeless.
