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.

Source