"Television used to be accused of corrupting the youth of today," the comedian David Mitchell told 750 representatives of the video game industry yesterday at the 25th Golden Joystick Awards. "Now you are."

In the 25 years since the first awards, Mitchell observed, computer games have gone from "being a few dots dancing around a TV screen to a full-on film that you are in."

As well as becoming more sophisticated, they are also now more lucrative. A major game, such as the recently launched Halo 3, can cost as much as $70 million to develop, but the possible rewards are vast. Halo 3 outstripped many blockbuster films in the week after launch, generating sales of $300 million.

Unlike the video game Baftas which took place earlier this week, the Golden Joysticks are voted for by members of the public. They chose to reward a wide range of games, with Wii Sports, God of War 2 and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, all picking up awards. The full list of winners is at the bottom of this page.

Among them was Tom Dowding, 25, who won £2,500 and a work placement with Electronic Arts, one of the world's biggest video game developers, for developing a game called Let it Grow. "You install it on your mobile phone," he said, "then using your phone camera you nurture it and make it grow. Then you post your growing flower on Facebook."

He has already licensed the game to a distributor, and hopes to be able to increase the size of his company's current workforce from two people by the end of the year.

Mobile phone games offer many budding developerd a way into a huge and growing market. Video games have quietly caught up with and overtaken traditional forms of entertainment such as film and popular music. According to the latest figures from Elspa, the industry body, UK game sales for the first half of 2007 were £519 million, 17 per cent up on the same period in 2006.

The launch of the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 last year resulted in a 42 per cent rise in sales of hardware and accessories, to more than £1 billion, and the market is still expanding.

The first generation of games players, teens who grew up hurling 10p pieces into Space Invaders arcade machines, are now in their 40s, and the high-end games they produce and continue to play are both technically sophisticated and, when done well, thought-provoking and challenging.

There are, thanks to pioneering work by Nintendo, even games designed for the late middle-aged and senior citizens. Market penetration in the company's home territory of Japan is now thought to have reached one in seven adults, many of whom use their games consoles for daily exercise routines, recipes or even gardening and fashion tips.

"What would the first Golden Joystick nominees make of the industry if they were here now?" Mitchell asked in his opening speech. "They expected space travel and robot slaves, but all we've got is better computer games." Quite.

GOLDEN JOYSTICK WINNERS