A new study by data.ai and IDC has revealed that mobile gaming is fast outgrowing the gaming industry as a whole, and is set to snag about 61 percent of the entire market share in 2022.
The report titled Gaming Spotlight 2022 has estimated that mobile gaming will reach a valuation of US$136 billion out of a total market size of US$222 billion. This estimate was reached after seeing users all over the world download 45 percent more mobile games per week during the first quarter of 2021compared to pre-pandemic levels – this number amounted to a staggering 1.1 billion mobile games downloaded per week during the period.
In the first quarter of 2022, it was observed that consumers spent over US$1.6 billion in total per week on mobile games on both the iOS App Store and Google Play store – a 30 percent increase in money spent compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The insights behind these stats were broken down further:
1. Asia Pacific saw the biggest growth in market share for global consumer spend, with China leading the numbers in the first quarter of 2022 and North America and Western Europe making up half of total mobile gaming spend.
2. Mobile games are now more democratized, with genre preferences heavily varied among consumers. From the top 10 mobile games ranked during this period, there were eight distinct subgenres represented.
3. Core games (those with real-time online features, player-versus-player, and cross-platform) such as PUBG Mobile still dominated consumer spending numbers.
4. The 4x March-Battle Strategy was deemed the most monetizable, while Open-World RPGs saw the biggest rise in consumer spend and market share.
5. In the U.S., nearly 50 percent of the top mobile games by consumer spend skewed towards female gamers, while even the Gen X and Baby Boomer segments saw growth in spending for mobile games.
If anything, the report has shown that the mobile gaming market has become nothing to sneeze at, even if it appears as if titles in this niche may not appear to have budgets as big as AAA-rated games from top studios made for PC or current-gen consoles.
Plus, alongside this growth is the opportunity for game developers to specialize in different types of genres of games, mostly due to the fact that mobile gamers seem to have more diverse preferences when it comes to the style of content that they enjoy.
"Mobile is democratizing the space and is now the primary driver of growth for digital games consumption," said Lexi Sydow, Head of Market Insights at data.ai.
"We are seeing greater diversity across gaming genres allowing publishers to serve new gamers across generations and genders."
You can read the full report with further statistics and insights here.
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Cover image sourced from Business of Esports and Arm.
