The adoption of Internet and smartphones have increased over the decade. People are now using mobile phones for almost everything, from entertainment to shopping, payments, travels, and games. Interestingly, the mobile gaming is one of the fastest-growing industries not only in India but also worldwide. Consumers are now spending more on in-app game purchases than ever before. The global consumer spending on mobile gaming apps is estimated to surpass $120 billion by the end of 2021.
The latest App Annie report reveals some surprising data related to global and India mobile gaming market 2021, users’ spending, game downloads, etc.
- The consumer spending on global gaming market is all set to surpass $204 billion in 2021, across mobile, console, handheld and PC/Mac gaming.
- Surprisingly, mobile will see 50% more consumer spend than all other forms of games by the end of 2021.
- The demand for mobile games has increased significantly since the Covid-19 lockdown began, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the global weekly downloads surpassed 1 billion for the first time in March 2020 and have remained stable since then.
- Globally, users downloaded 30% more mobile games per week in Q1 2021 than in Q4 2019, totalling over 1 billion game downloads per week.
- In the first half of 2021, consumers spent $1.7 billion per week in mobile games, up 40% from pre-pandemic levels.
- Globally, people spent nearly 5 billion hours per week on mobile games from January 2020 to H1 2021.
- In H1 2021, there were 815 games that exceeded $1 million in consumer spend each month on average, with 7 of them exceeding $100M. That’s an impressive 25% increase from 2019 when 652 games surpassed $1M and only 2 games surpassed over $100M in monthly consumer spend.
- India continue to be the world’s biggest mobile game market by downloads. It was 2018 when India surpassed United States for the first time to become the top market by mobile game downloads.
- Ludo King emerged as the top game in India in H1 2021, in terms of the number of downloads and active users. However, Join Clash 3D is the world’s top mobile game by number of downloads and PUBG MOBILE is the world’s top game by active users.
Food For Thought
The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the amount of time and money spent on mobile games. Top gaming publishers such as Tencent, Nintendo, Zynga, NetEase, AppLovin, and others are increasingly prioritising mobile as part of their platform of choice to expand their user base, and eventually witnessed the significant increase in their revenues over the last one year. According to Sensor Tower report, the mobile gaming market generated $79.6 billion across the App Store and Google Play in 2020, with a 26.2% YoY increase. This figure is expected to increase drastically in the upcoming years. Games like PUBG, Honor of Kings have already established themselves as the top money-spinners on a global scale. After witnessing global success, PUBG Mobile, the popular battle Royale game, has made a comeback as an Indian-exclusive version called ‘Battlegrounds Mobile India‘ to lure Indian consumers.
