This week in weekly recap:
StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg: Twitch settled a new quarter record in Q2 2021
PwC: The Gaming Industry will continue to grow in 2021-2025
Sensor Tower: Top Grossing Mobile Games in June 2021
GameRefinery: Match-3 trends in 2021
App Annie: Russian Mobile Gaming Market in 2020 and H1 2021
Newzoo: Adventure games on consoles has the best daily average playtime
AppsFlyer: African Mobile Market Report
Sensor Tower: Top Mobile Games by Downloads in June 2021
Sensor Tower: Mobile Market in Q2 2021
The NPD Group: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart made it to the top in June 2021
If you’d like to receive updates instantly, please, subscribe to the newsletter.
StreamElements & Rainmaker.gg: Twitch settled a new quarter record in Q2 2021
In the second quarter of this year, people watched 6.2B hours of content at Twitch. It’s 4% more than in Q1 2021.
Facebook Gaming reached 1.21B hours watched during the same period and showed the same 4% growth compared to the previous quarter.
GTA V is the most viewed game of June with 167M hours watched. Next are League of Legends (143M hours), Call of Duty Warzone (80M hours), and Valorant (76M hours).
PwC: The Gaming Industry will continue to grow in 2021-2025
By 2025 the gaming market will reach $194.7B in valuation. About 60% of the revenue will come from social and casual games. CAGR will be about 4.4%.
By the end of 2025, the PC market will be 99.8% digital. The console market will remain the only one with physical copies usage. However, it will be shrinking too - the revenue from physical copies will fall from 48.2% in 2021 to 35.5% in 2025.
The US and Chinese markets will grow in line.
The VR market will be the most rapidly growing. By 2025 its valuation will be $6.9B with a CAGR of 30.3%.
Sensor Tower: Top Grossing Mobile Games in June 2021
10 top-grossing games earned $1.4 billion in June. Each of the projects received more than $100M, which is the record - never before in the history 10 projects achieved this milestone in one month.
The Mobile Gaming market was valued at $7.3 billion in June 2021 - it’s 10% more than a year before.
The best game by revenue is Honor of Kings by Tencent with $277M (+21% growth YoY). 95.6% of revenue comes from China.
PUBG Mobile (Tencent again) is second with $213.8M of revenue and 11% growth YoY. 53.3% of revenue comes from China, 11.2% - from the US.
GameRefinery: Match-3 trends in 2021
Social features and communities are playing a more significant role in Match-3 games. During the last year, those features were implemented in 30% more projects in top-100 Match-3.
Retention & engagement becoming more & more important in the post-IDFA era.
Many developers started to integrate special recurring events with unlimited lives for a limited time as a reward.
The popularity of special game modes is increasing.
Season Pass implementation is growing significantly. The feature is currently used by 30% of top Match-3 games.
App Annie: Russian Mobile Gaming Market in 2020 and H1 2021
In H1 2021 Russian users generated 1.34B downloads. It’s the 5th result in the world.
During the same period, mobile games earned $478M in Russia. In terms of revenue, the region is in 11th place
During 2020 mobile games downloads in Russia increased by 17% YoY and revenue increased by 25% YoY. The revenue growth rate is exceeding the average worldwide numbers (+17% YoY).
Top downloaded games in 2020 in Russia were My Talking Tom and Friends, Brawl Stars, and PUBG Mobile. In H1 2021 it’s DOP 2: Delete One Part, Brawl Stars, and Among Us
The top games by revenue in 2020 in Russia were Hero Wars, Brawl Stars, and Gardenscapes. In H1 2021 - Brawl Stars, PUBG Mobile, and Homescapes.
Games with the best Active Users / Revenue ratio in H1 2021 were Brawl Stars, PUBG Mobile, Homescapes, Gardenscapes, Standoff 2, and Roblox.
The game with the longest game sessions was Empires & Puzzles.
Newzoo: Adventure games on consoles has the best daily average playtime
In June 2020 daily average playtime in the adventure genre resulted in 124 minutes. RPG is right after with 121 minutes.
As for the stickiness, Battle Royale and Sports games are the best. Newzoo tracks the stickiness by the number of days played in a month - in the aforementioned genres it equals 12.8 days.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare / Warzone is the first game on consoles by hours played (231M hours). Fortnite is second with 41M hours less.
Among the 6 most popular console titles in June, Destiny 2 has the best daily average playtime - 150 minutes. An average Destiny 2 player spends in game 32.6 hours per month.
AppsFlyer: African Mobile Market Report
From Q1 2020 to Q1 2021 downloads increased by 41%.
Nigeria showed the best growth temp - +43%. South Africa (+37%) and Kenya (+29%) are in second and third places. The gaming market showed 44% growth from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021.
The first lockdown in March 2020 boosted the gaming industry. In Q2 2020 downloads increased by 50%, compared to Q1 2020. Non-gaming apps showed only 8% growth during the same period.
33% of the whole app market comes from Q3 2020.
Revenue from advertisement increased by 167% in Q1 2021 compared to Q2 2020.
Sensor Tower: Top Mobile Games by Downloads in June 2021
Count Masters from Tap2Play was the first one with 40.5 million downloads. The US is accounted for 11.8% of all downloads, India - for 11.4%.
Second place belongs to Bridge Race from Supersonic, it had 28.6 million installs in June. The majority of the audience is from India - 32%.
In June users downloaded games 4.5 billion times - it’s 2.4% less, than a year before.
In terms of downloads, India is a behemoth with 840 million downloads and 18.7% of the global amount. Next are the US (9%) and Brazil (8.3%).
Sensor Tower: Mobile Market in Q2 2021
Apps were downloaded 35.9B times in Q2 2021 through App Store and Google Play - it’s 4.8% less than a year before. iOS suffering more, it lost 13.3% of downloads, while Google Play only 2.1%.
The most popular game of the quarter with nearly 90M downloads was Bridge Race.
In Q2 2021 App Store downloads resulted in 2.09B (-22,3% YoY), Google Play users managed to produce 11.81B downloads (-4,4% YoY).
Garena Free Fire is in the quarter top-5 by downloads the fifth time in a row. In Q2 2021 it was third.
India, the US, Brazil, Indonesia, and Russia are the top-5 countries by downloads.
The full version of the report is available here.
The NPD Group: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart made it to the top in June 2021
PlayStation 5 exclusive managed to beat Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War and Mario Golf: Super Rush. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart became the most successful part of the series in terms of launch sales. It’s exceeded the Ratchet and Clank (2016) results by more than 2 times.
Users have spent $4.94B on games in June 2021 (+5% MoM).
Consoles & hardware sales increased by 112% and reached $401M.
Xbox Series S|X was the top console by sales - the first time in history. But in terms of consoles sold, Nintendo Switch is still first. PlayStation 5 was third, however, DualSense is the most popular accessory.