Sensor Tower: Mobile Gaming Market will shrink in 2022 by 2.3%
The second consecutive month of falling.
The market in general
The number of mobile game downloads last year (from Q2 2021 to Q2 2022) didn’t change. But it’s still higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The mobile gaming market continued its fall in Q2 2022 ($20.1B vs $21.6B in Q1 2021). The first decline in history was tracked in Q1 2022.
Sensor Tower analysts expect an annual revenue drop of 2.3%. The mobile gaming industry will earn $86B.
However, the market should get back to growth in 2023. And in 2026 it will reach $117B.
Casual games are responsible for 78% of downloads. Midcore games are generating only 14%. Despite this, mid-core titles are covering 60% of overall mobile games revenue. The most significant genre is an RPG, which is responsible for 27% of overall mobile game industry revenue.
The US is the largest mobile market (but Sensor Tower is not tracking Chinese alternative stores). It went down in Q2 2022 by 11%. Taiwan made it to the top 5 with a 4% growth and kicked off Germany.
MMORPG insights
MMORPG is the second after the 4X Strategies genre by revenue. In H1 2022 games of this subgenre earned about $3.6B on mobile.
Asian countries are still generating about 80% of the MMORPG revenue. However, the situation changes: the US is responsible for 10% of the subgenre downloads in H1 2022 (it’s a 2x growth from the previous year). But this growth was mostly because of the Diablo Immortal release.
Diablo Immortal is one of the most successful MMORPG launches in US mobile history. In the first 6 weeks, the game earned $28M. The closest MMORPG competitor earned $5M.