Research Outline

Mobile Gaming Industry

Goals

To understand the mobile gaming industry.

Early Findings

  • The North American market size for mobile gaming is estimated at $10 billion, with mobile gaming accounting for around 51% of the global gaming industry.
  • There will be an estimated 213 million mobile gamers by 2020, up from 180.4 million in 2016.
  • However, TechCrunch has a slightly different estimation. They found the global gaming industry is worth $152 billion, with mobile gaming having a 45% market share ($68.5 billion).
  • The mobile gaming segment is predicted to grow 10.2% YOY.
  • Games account for 1/3 of all app downloads, nearly 3/4 of money spent on apps and 1/10 of time spent within mobile apps.
  • Nearly 2.4 billion people worldwide are predicted to spend time on mobile gaming by the end of 2019.
  • The average age of a mobile gamer is 36.3 and they are fairly evenly split between male/female.
  • The leading mobile gaming development companies are Supercell, Tencent, Niantic, NetEase and Machine Zone.
  • According to Apple and Google, out of 792,000 publishers on their app stores, 108,000 are game publishers (~15%).
  • Around 50% of all app users play games on their mobile device. The category is second only to social media and communications among all app types.
  • One key driver for the growth of mobile gaming, aside from general smartphone penetration, is improved technology leading to a more realistic and improved gaming experience.