The only thing that's certain about predictions is they are no more accurate than random guesses.

An interesting introduction to the latest prediction on the size of the games market from Newzoo, you might be thinking.

And you'd be half right.

As you can see from the following graphs, Newzoo has predicted the growth of the games software market, also breaking out the growth of the mobile games sector, from 2012 to 21017.

But with that opening sentence in mind, we've split the data further, separating the relative knowns knowns of 2012 to 2014 and the known unknowns of 2015 to 2017.

For the first set of data, the growth of the mobile game sector is very impressive; up 72 percent over the period to $21.8 billion. That's 27 percent of the overall game software business.

More significantly, mobile games account for 83 percent of the entire industry's growth during period.

Shadowy man, shadowy planet

As for the predictive part of Newzoo's graph, let's just be charitable and say no one knows.

If by some miracle these numbers are proven correct, mobile games will have accounted for 70 percent of the growth of the games market between 2012 and 2017, and be 34 perecent of the industry's total revenue of $102.9 billion.

But given the unknown unknowns during that period - augmented reality, virtual reality, the global impact of the Chinese market, wearables, location-based services, etc etc - we can safely say those numbers are educated hokum, but hokum nevertheless.