Game Industry Overview and Trends

The global video game market size was valued at USD 165.06 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.4% from 2021 to 2027.

(Source: Visualcapitalist, 2020)

In an eye-opening report from the analysts at Visualcapitalist, 51,5% of that gaming market revenue coming from mobile games. During the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the whole world in early 2020, the 15% increase in the number of weekly game downloads showed us the potential of the mobile game industry. In 2020, PC games such as Fortnite, League of Legends and PUBG offered their users multiple platforms by publishing their mobile games on smartphone app stores.

Why do you think the world’s most played PC-based multiplayer game companies have integrated their games into the mobile gaming market?

(Source: Newzoo, 2020)

New gamers trends shows, the game market is expected to reach USD 180 billion in 2021 and mobile games will also outpace the console’s revenue growth. Mobile games have become so popular that 72.3% of mobile users in the US are also mobile phone gamers.

Additionally, 80% of video game sales are now digital, rather than physical copies (Source:Entertainment Retailers Association, 2020). In this case, although selling digital games instead of physical sales is an effort to increase the market share in the sales of PC and console games, the mobile gaming market share is rapidly increasing due to low hardware requirements and an accessible gaming experience anywhere.

Gaming apps are the most popular app sub-category accounting for 25% of most active iOS app and 21% of Android Apps. 62% of smartphone owners install a game within a week of getting their phones and Mobile Games now account for more than 43% of total time spent on smartphone. Android gamers represent 78% of the global mobile gaming market and can be worth eight times more than iOS players in the country.

The numbers of mobile gamer is also increasing. In 2020 the number of global mobile gamers will be more than 2.4 billion. 2.7 billion by 2021! China the biggest mobile gamer market with 620 million mobile game players. Followed by the United States 209 million mobile game players.

Before we drill down into mobile game genres and compare their popularity in different languages we should point out their speed of growth.

On average, looking at the last three months of the US App Store statistics, there are more than 3,000 new iOS games released every month.

If we do the same calculation for the total number of apps in 2018, we find between 6,000 and 12,000 new iOS apps released monthly. In April 2020, 1,120 new apps have been published every day.

For Android, there are 2.1 million apps on Google Play. 7.5 billion gaming apps have been downloaded in Q1 of 2019, 35% more than 3 years ago.

In Q2 2020, users downloaded over 14 billion (!) gaming apps from both Google Play and App Store.

(Source: Go-globe , 2018)

Mobile gaming market has lots of different genres that can target any taste. And here’s all the mobile game categories:

• Action
• Adventure
• Arcade
• Battle Royale
• Casual
• Card
• Role-Playing
• MOBA — Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
• Puzzle
• Racing
• Strategy
• Sports
• Trivia

Mobile game publishers often refer to download statistics when discussing the success of their games. Downloads matter, but don’t jump to any strong conclusions about them. The monthly active users (MAU) metric counts the number of people who open a mobile game’s app at least once in a 30-day period. Unlike downloads, which solely measure installs, MAU captures how many people actually use a game app. So it’s a better behavioral indicator of popularity than downloads.

(Source: Go-globe , 2018)

Looking at the total revenue in these mobile game industry statistics tells us which genres are attracting the most overall player spend, but in terms of setting goals and benchmarking your game’s performance, it’s just as (or more) important to consider the average mobile game revenue per player. The more money each player spends in your game app, the fewer players you need to meet your revenue goals.

If you’re monetizing an app with advertising, then the more time your users spend playing your mobile game, the better. More time = more opportunities to show ads. The underlying components of the time-spent-per-month figures are the engagement metrics of days-per-month and time-per-day. These vary among games genres and aren’t correlated with each other.

Source: App Annie, 2020)

According to App Annie, in the first half of 2020, hyper-casual games dominated the global mobile market.

Three of the top 5 grossing mobile games featured real-time multiplayer gameplay — from PvP battle, co-op play, to MMORPGs — what proves that this genre can be as popular on smartphones as on PC.

Highest share of mobile game downloads

(Number of downloads in July, 2016)

1. Arcade (63.1M)
2. Action (61.5M)
3. Puzzle (35.5M)
4. Simulation (34.1M)
5. Adventure (31.8M)

Highest share of mobile game active users

(MAU in July, 2016)

1. Arcade (80.7M)
2. Adventure (69.8M)
3. Puzzle (64.5M)
4. Action (61.0M)
5. Simulation (56.5M)

Highest share of mobile game revenue

(Revenue in July, 2016)

1. Strategy ($194.4M)
2. Role Playing ($162.2M)
3. Adventure ($114.1M)
4. Action ($97.8M)
5. Puzzle ($92.8M),

There are 3 lessons about the mobile gaming industry to be drawn from this report:

• Downloads don’t guarantee active users, which don’t guarantee engagement or revenue. Evaluate the success of your application with a different KPI based on the type, not the number of downloads.
• Certainly every mobile game’s success is highly dependent on its design and user acquisition strategy (and budget). But in terms of improving your chances for success in the mobile game market, it wouldn’t hurt to develop a game in one of these three genres(Adventure, Action, and Puzzle games).
• Follow the trends as the mobile game industry is a sector that takes action and changes much faster than other game industries. That’s why finding blue oceans before sharks, creates the real opportunity.

The mobile app market is more crowded and competitive than ever. The prospect of trying to break through the noise and succeed with a new game title can seem daunting. But remember, the demand for mobile games is huge!

References:

• https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoo-cuts-global-games-forecast-for-2018-to-134-9-billion/
• https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mobile-gaming-statistics
• http://www.laiggs.com/en/game-industry-statistics
• https://gameanalytics.com/blog/best-social-games-lockdown-2020-part-two/
• https://www.wepc.com/statistics/mobile-gaming/
• https://ourworldindata.org/internet
• https://www.appannie.com/dashboard/home?activate=1&homepage.selected-chart=quadrant&homepage.topType=apps