Weekly Reports Recap: January 10 - January 14
The first recap of the year!
This week:
Newzoo & Pangle: RPG Genre Overview
Sensor Tower: Europeans have spent on games in 2021 16.7% more than in 2020
ERA: In 2021 the UK games market went down by 3.3% compared to 2020
Research Dive: By 2028 the gaming ads market will reach $14B
Niko Partners: Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt markets will reach $3,1B in 2025
Sensor Tower: Mobile Industry Results in Q4 2021 by downloads
Twitter: Users have made more than 2.4B tweets about games in 2021
App Annie: Mobile Games earned $116.01B in 2021
Sensor Tower: Top Grossing Mobile Games in December 2021
Apple: App Store earned $60B in 2021
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Newzoo & Pangle: RPG Genre Overview
In 2020, the genre was responsible for 21.2% of overall mobile games revenue. It’s $18.5B.
72% of this amount came from Eastern Asia users. China brought $7.84B, Japan - $3.46B, South Korea - $2,04B.
Eastern RPGs are using more game mechanics to monetize users more efficiently.
About half of the most successful RPG games are based on IP. It’s helping them to attract organic users effectively.
The majority of RPG revenue is still based on IAP. However, 83% of RPG players were positive about in-game ads, if it will bring them additional bonuses.
On average, people are playing RPG games to unwind and fill their free time.
The majority of RPG players are male (about 60%).
Sensor Tower: Europeans have spent on games in 2021 16.7% more than in 2020
Overall spendings on apps increased by 22,8% and reached $18.3B.
Games are responsible for about 61% of this sum - $11.2B. It’s 16,7% higher than in 2020. However, the revenue ratio decreased from 64.8% in 2020.
The European market in 2021 was counted as 12.7% of the world market.
Google Play in Europe earned more than App Store. $6.4B (+18.5% YoY) versus $4.8B (+14,3% YoY).
Germany ($1.3B), the UK, and France are the main regions for Google Play by revenue.
Downloads in Europe decreased from 12.5B in 2020 to 11.9B in 2021. It’s about 4.8% down.
PUBG Mobile is the most successful game in the region. It’s earned $404.2M per year (+58,3% YoY). Coin Master is second ($392M), Roblox is third ($264M).
By revenue growth, PUBG Mobile is first too. Second place belongs to State of Survival (+51.4% in revenue), Roblox is third again (+29.4%).
Count Masters with 38.2M downloads became the most downloaded game in Europe in 2021.
ERA: In 2021 the UK games market went down by 3.3% compared to 2020
The UK market valuation is £4.2B.
ERA analytics are mentioning, that the growth to 2019 is 13.9%. Abnormal growth of pandemic 2020 might not be counted.
Semi-conductors shortage caused a negative effect on the UK market with PS5 & Xbox Series sales below estimations.
Physical game copies sales decreased by 20.8% compared to 2020, and 15.1% compared to 2019. The volume is £511M.
Digital game copies sales increased by 19.4% compared to 2019 and declined only by 0.4% compared to 2020. The volume is £3.7B.
FIFA 22 became the best-selling game in the UK. It was sold about 2.2M times.
The only segment that showed growth in 2021 in the UK was Mobile with 8.1% up compared to 2020.
Games revenue are higher than Music (£1.6B) and Movies (£3.7B) sectors.
Research Dive: By 2028 the gaming ads market will reach $14B
CAGR by 2028 will be about 11.2%, based on experts’ assumptions.
Analytics are foretelling, that the highest growth will show the Static Ads segment. By Research Dive classification, this is a category of in-game native ads, like Anzu is doing.
Ten largest players of the segment by Research Dive: Alphabet, RapidFire, MediaSpike, Electronic Arts, IronSource, Motive Interactive, Blizzard Entertainment, Playwire, WPP, Anzu.
However, there are some questions to the research:
Why there are EA & Blizzard Entertainment in line with Alphabet & IronSource?
Where are AppLovin and Unity, the largest mobile ad companies?
So, I’d suggest taking the research with a grain of salt.
Niko Partners: Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt markets will reach $3,1B in 2025
In 2021, the Saudi Arabian market alone is valued at $1B. The cumulative valuation of the three top MENA markets is about $1,76B.
The number of players will increase from 65.3M to 85.76M.
More than half of MENA players are younger than 25 years.
Sensor Tower: Mobile Industry Results in Q4 2021 by downloads
The overall amount of downloads increased from 35.2B in Q4 2020 to 36.2B in Q4 2021.
Games have been downloaded 13.87B times.
India (6.9B of downloads), the US (3.2B of downloads), and Brazil (2.7B of downloads) are leading charts. Russia is in 5th place and it’s the only country that showed positive YoY growth.
Garena Free Fire had the second best quarter in history. The game received more than 80M downloads.
There are 7 game companies among the top-10 mobile publishers. It’s AppLovin, Embracer Group, Say Games, Azur Interactive, Voodoo, OneSoft, and Supersonic Studios.
Twitter: Users have made more than 2.4B tweets about games in 2021
It’s 14% more than in 2020. But the most shocking results we’ll get if we compare 2021 results with 2017 - there is a 10x increase.
Genshin Impact, Apex Legends, and Ensemble Stars are the most popular games on Twitter. It might be surprising for somebody, but Final Fantasy is in fourth place.
App Annie: Mobile Games earned $116.01B in 2021
In 2021 the mobile gaming market earned $15.49B more, than in 2020.
The number of downloads reached 82.98B. Plus 3.03B to the 2020 results.
Hypercasual titles are leading the top downloads charts. Interesting, that the Racing Simulation genre is in 5th place by downloads with 1.63B installs.
4X March Battle games are leaders by revenue. They earned $9.7B in 2021.
Battlers are played preliminary by males, while the Match 3 audience is mostly female. ROBLOX and the whole Creative Sandbox category have an ideal split of 50/50.
Sensor Tower: Top Grossing Mobile Games in December 2021
PUBG Mobile in December 2021 received $244M revenue. It’s 36.7% higher than a year before. 68.3% of the revenue came from China, 6.8% - from the US, another 5.5% - from Turkey.
Genshin Impact had a nice month too with $134.3M revenue. 28% of this sum belongs to China, 23.4% to the US.
In December users spent on games $7.4B. It’s 2% less, compared to December 2020.
The top market by revenue was the US ($2.2B; 29.6% of overall revenue); Japan got second place (20.3% of revenue), China is third (15.7% of revenue). But Sensor Tower is not tracking the alternative Android Stores, so Chinese numbers, in reality, are higher.
Apple: App Store earned $60B in 2021
Lifetime revenue for App Store is $260B. The result of this year is a new record.
Games, based on Daniel Akhmad's data, are responsible for not less than 60% of $60B. So, it’s $36B at least.
Apple named this holiday season the most successful in history and highlighted, that it was two times more successful than in 2020. 2020 holidays brought the company $1.8B, so in 2021 it must be $3.6B.