New week - new reports! Today:
Sensor Tower: Mobile Sports games in the US received $648.8 million in revenue in a year
GameAnalytics: Hypercasual Games metrics snapshot
KPMG: Indian Gaming Industry will grow by 113% by 2025
IGEA: Australian gaming industry won from the coronavirus
VG Insights: COVID-19 effect on Steam releases in 2020
Newzoo & arm: High-fidelity Mobile Games Report
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Sensor Tower: Mobile Sports games in the US received $648.8 million in revenue in a year
Sports games showed 16% growth YoY.
The top game in revenue is Golf Clash with $132.8 million generated through the last year.
From June 2020 to May 2021 Sports games were downloaded 129.3 million times. It’s a 16.3% decrease compared to the year before. The most downloaded game was 8 Ball Pool with 9.4 million downloads.
The most profitable Sports games subcategory is Realistic Sports Games. Users spent $382 million in this subcategory, which is more than half of the whole Sports games revenue.
GameAnalytics: Hypercasual Games metrics snapshot
GameAnalytics tracked only 5% of best games for making this report.
The best average D1 Retention has timing hypercasual games - 44%.
The best average D7 Retention has hypercasual shooters - 17%.
Hypercasual shooters also have the best playtime daily - 45 minutes.
Timing-based Hypercasual games have the best ARPPU - $42.
Timing-based Hypercasual Games also has the best ARPDAU - $0.15.
They also have the best conversion into payment (0.94%).
The best D1 Retention is in France (49%); D7 Retention in Germany (19%); the highest playtime is in Japan (63 minutes).
The full report is available here.
KPMG: Indian Gaming Industry will grow by 113% by 2025
Money-wise it will reach $3.91 billion by 2025. Currently, it’s evaluated at $1.83 billion.
The number of players will increase by 52% from 2021 to 2025 - from 433 million to 657 million users.
KPMG is segmenting games to “casual” (category includes all games - from Candy Crush to DOTA 2), real-money games (casino or card), and fantasy sports games.
“Casual” games will show the highest growth rate - from $808 million in 2021 to $2.28 billion in 2025.
IGEA: Australian gaming industry won from the coronavirus
62% of Australian studios started to earn more revenue in the past 12 months. A year ago only 33% of companies could have said this.
63% of studios want to hire people from the short-term perspective. And only 4% thinking about lay-offs.
60% of studios are using the hybrid working model.
31% of respondents told that they lost in contractual revenue in the past 12 months. 61% of them experienced the negative effect of pandemics.
VG Insights: COVID-19 effect on Steam releases in 2020
2020 became the record year in Steam in terms of releases. More than 10,000 games appeared on the platform - it’s 23.7% more than in 2019. It was the first year in history when Steam releases reached this plank.
Number of big (AAA/AA) releases decreased by 13.7% compared to 2019 (2019 - 175; 2020 - 151). In contrary, indie releases showed growth by 24.6% (2019 - 7,926; 2020 - 9,873).
The pandemic affected badly AAA/AA releases in Q1-Q2 2020 and forced developers to postpone them. Indie developers haven’t noticed any troubles.
The average indie-game price in 2020 increased to $7.5. In 2019 it was $7.3; in 2018 - $6.4.
Newzoo & arm: High-fidelity Mobile Games Report
It’s fair to say that high-fidelity mobile games, from the Newzoo expert’s perspective, are mobile AAA. They do have complex gameplay, high-quality graphic, and mostly represented by hardcore genres.
In 2020 Mobile AAA games were responsible for 70% of top-200 mobile games revenue in China. For comparison, in 2016 only 42% of mobile games top-200 revenue belonged to them. Top high-fidelity games in China are Honor of Kings, Peacekeeper Elite, and CrossFire Mobile.
In North America, the AAA games in top-200 revenue share increased from 6% in 2016 to 33% in 2020. Top high-fidelity games are ROBLOX, Pokemon Go, PUBG Mobile.
The situation is pretty similar in Europe. High-fidelity games showed growth from 7% of revenue in 2016 to 37% of revenue in 2020 in top-200 mobile games. In 2020 the top-grossing AAA mobile games were Pokemon Go, Brawl Stars, and ROBLOX.
From January 2019 to December 2020 number of high-end smartphones increased sufficiently - from 7.6% to 35.3% globally.
94% of all gamers are playing on mobile.
Newzoo experts are positive that the revenue of the high-fidelity games will continue to grow. PC/Console publishers moving to the mobile market will help it happen.