Gaming, and mobile gaming in particular, continues to grow rapidly in the entertainment industry. More people are playing games than ever before as a way to interact socially and spend their free time, and Covid-19 is only accelerating the growth of the gaming industry.
Newzoo estimates that mobile gaming revenue will reach $76.7 billion by the end of 2020, a 12 percent increase over 2019. By comparison, global box office revenue was $42.5 billion. In 2019, the global music industry generated $20.2 billion in wholesale revenue. In other words, by the end of 2020, mobile games alone brought in more annual revenue than the music and movie industries combined.
Mobile Gaming Industry Statistics
According to GameAnalytics, the number of mobile gamers grew from 1.2 billion to 1.75 billion per month in the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 46%.
Newzoo says the number of mobile gamers in 2020 peaked at 2.6 billion, of which 38% are paying for games.
Consumers spent more than $19 billion on mobile games in the second quarter of 2020, the largest quarter ever, according to App Annie, with 21% of Android apps and 25% of iOS apps downloaded being games. Google Play revenue continues to grow faster than iOS App Store revenue: from 19.6% to 13.2%
Android games are projected to account for 56% of all mobile gaming revenue by 2023.
Mobile Game Market
App Annie data shows that casual games lead the world in download growth, up 45% over the first half of 2020.
For marketers, the cost to acquire a player in 2020 dropped significantly to $1.47, 66% less than in 2019. Despite this, it is more expensive to acquire a paying user than it was in 2019: the $43.88 cost means a 24% increase over the same period last year. This suggests that app developers will focus more on monetizing users through advertising.
Mobile gaming trends in 2022
According to App Annie, here are the top 10 mobile games worldwide from 2020 in terms of downloads:
- Free Fire (Garena Online).
- Subway Surfers (Sybo)
- PUBG Mobile (Tencent)
- Gardenscapes – New Acres (Playrix)
- Brain Out (Eyewind)
- Ludio King (Gametion)
- My Talking Tom Friends (Outfit7)
- Homescapes (Playrix)
- Brain Test: Tricky Puzzles (Unico Studio)
- Tiles Hop: EDM Rush (Amanotes)
Mobile gaming industry analysis and trends in 2022
Gametech will continue to drive gaming growth.
In 2020, Newzoo released an infographic depicting the many levels of the gametech ecosystem that both supports the gaming industry and fosters its growth.
New technologies and developments in the gametech ecosystem will continue to strengthen the industry: on the development side, game engines such as Unity and Unreal will improve their products and allow more game developers to create compelling products. In terms of platforms, leading game companies such as Epic Games and Roblox will continue to merge music and movies with virtual game worlds, ushering in a new era of innovative experiences, and the advertising technology and monetization tools developers use to make money will become even more advanced, most notably in-app betting.
Betting solutions like ironSource LevelPlay are used by mobile game developers of all genres, allowing them to maximize ad monetization and automate labor-intensive processes and the technology will only get better.
The high rate of ad monetization within games.
As pointed out by GameRefinery in IronSource’s 2020 Game Trends Survey, developers of all genres are widely using in-game advertising to support monetization of in-app purchases. With fierce competition forcing developers to optimize their ads in terms of both creativity and in-game placement, ad units such as reward videos and ad walls actually add value to gameplay, and for many interested players, they are a welcome alternative to real cash payments.
There are several reasons why we are likely to see further proliferation of ad monetization in IAP-focused games. First, as mentioned earlier, in 2020, the cost of attracting a user to make in-app purchases jumped 24% year over year to $43.88. As a consequence, many managers will try to attract cost-effective users who can be monetized through advertising instead of in-app purchases. In fact, the most savvy development managers are already realizing the potential of subscription advertising, such as offerwall, to further increase IAP by giving users a “taste” of premium content without spending any money.
Apple’s ATT platform will force UA managers to adapt
Apple’s new privacy rules, which aim to prevent unwanted tracking at the user level by giving users more control over their data, will force UA managers to change their approach. App Tracking Transparency (ATT) is one way Apple is implementing these changes. Essentially, it will require all apps to ask users for permission to track their data, and many industry professionals expect that most users will not give permission.This means that existing methods of tracking and optimizing marketing campaigns and ad monetization will not be possible in most cases.
Apple will provide developers with an alternative way to intelligently track campaigns through its SKAdnetwork, opening up a new environment for UA and what it takes to effectively engage users in the mobile gaming industry.
Social features will continue to grow
As app stores become more and more saturated, finding ways to retain users for longer is a top priority for developers: expect to see many games, from casual to hardcore, integrate social mechanisms such as activity feeds (where users can follow the game progress of others), in-game chats, push notifications that alert users to mentions or invitations from friends, and guilds (clans or AKA groups), not to forget the game associate The development of the hyper-casual games category, with developers adding more depth and meta-features to their games, could also contribute to a surge in social interaction.
The rise of Bunch, which attracted a $20 million investment from EA and Ubisoft in September 2020 for its app that allows players to have group video chats during multiplayer games, are an indicator of where the industry is headed.
Unification
Despite the Covid-19 coronavirus, there have been many mergers and acquisitions in the mobile gaming industry in 2020, and the main theme has been company mergers. In 2020, Zynga acquired two leading Istanbul developers, Peak Games for $1.8 billion and Rollic Games for $180 million, Stillfront Group acquired Storm8 for $300 million, Take Two acquired Playdots (which developed the popular game Two Dots) for $192 million, Miniclip acquired Israel-based Ilyon Games for $100 million, etc. We expect this trend to continue, and gaming giants will absorb mid-tier gaming companies.