Sensor Tower: Mobile Gaming Market in 2023
Everything you want to know about trends, current mobile gaming market situations, and particular genres numbers is inside.
Trends
The majority of game genres in 2022 fell by downloads. Hypercasual games downloads decreased by 24%. On the contrary, hybrid-casual titles grew by 13% - Sensor Tower forecasts that this genre will replace the traditional hypercasual experience.
All genres’ revenue (despite exclusions like tabletop games or action genres) dropped. Shooters experienced a severe fall of 25%, and RPGs are next with a 20% decline. RPG titles are on a downfall trend for 7 consecutive quarters.
Asia is the main market for RPG titles. 39% of all revenue is coming from this region.
Hybrid casual market in 2022
$1.4B is the overall hybrid casual revenue in 2022. The subgenre is growing for the 4th year in a row.
Downloads in 2022 reached 5.1B which is also a growth from the previous year.
99 new hybrid casual games have been released in 2022.
Hybrid casual games do have longer game sessions (especially on iOS) and average monthly playtime compared to classic hypercasual titles.
Oceania (+18% YoY), North America (+17% YoY), and Africa (+9% YoY) are leaders in downloads growth for hybrid casual games.
NFT and Web-3 games
Mobile Web-3 games are declining by downloads from Q3 2022. In H1 2022 downloads of such games reached 46M, in H2 2022 downloads dropped to 29M.
The situation with MAU is similar, the only difference is that the decline started in Q2 2022.
Meta & monetization trends
Sensor Tower is positive that we’ve entered the GaaS mobile era.
Games that are responsible for 97% of mobile games revenue are using different Live Ops approaches.
15% of top titles with loot boxes are generating 73% of worldwide mobile revenue.
Heroes collection is one of the core pillars of monetization. It can be found in 7 out of 10 top titles by revenue.
Games with a combination of heroes collections and social elements (clans), experience better user engagement compared to games without those features or which have only one of them.
Gaming market numbers in 2022
Mobile games revenue is declining for 5 consecutive quarters. It started in Q4 2021.
The US remains the largest mobile gaming market with $5.5B+ revenue in each quarter of 2022. But in Q4 2022 the decline to the previous year was 6%.
Japanese (-22% YoY), South Korean (-20% YoY), and Taiwanese (-12% YoY) markets experienced the largest declines in 2022.
India grew by revenue in Q4 2022 by 13% YoY and reached $2.5B annually.
Since 2019 the US increased its mobile gaming market share from 26% to 29%. Japan is losing it. China too, but Sensor Tower is not tracking 3rd-party Android stores.
Downloads on the mobile gaming market are stable for the last couple of years. After the peak in Q1-Q2 2020, they declined by 2% in Q3-Q4 2021, and 1% in Q3-Q4 2022.
India in 2022 generated 17% of worldwide gaming downloads. The US and Brazil generated 8% each. Indonesia - 6%, Russia - 5%.
The US mobile gaming market
2022 ended with a decline of 6%.
Games downloads in the US in 2022 fell lower than pre-pandemic levels. Before COVID-19, in Q4 2019, downloads reached 1,269B. In Q4 2022 they’ve been 1,107B.
The European mobile gaming market
The European market declined by 11% in revenue in 2022. However, results are still significantly better than pre-pandemic levels.
Russia's drop in revenue was 72%, which made it out of the top-5 European markets for the first time in history. The UK had a steep decline of 13% YoY in Q4 2022 too.
Downloads got back to the pre-pandemic levels.
Despite monetization issues, Russia is still the largest European market by downloads. The country generated 673M downloads in Q4 2022 - it’s 24% of the overall amount.
The Asian gaming market
Revenue declined by 14% in 2022.
Downloads in Q4 2022 increased by 6% YoY. It’s the only big region that showed growth - thanks to India.
