Consumers worldwide spent an average of $1.6 billion per week on mobile gaming in 2022, according to Data.ai’s State of Mobile Gaming 2023 report.
Weekly downloads topped a billion worldwide, whereas time spent on mobile gaming reached an average of 6.4 billion hours per week. Notably, while hours spent on mobile games and consumer spend are both down compared to their peaks during the pandemic, weekly downloads have continued to grow. January 2022 saw installs hit 1.23 billion downloads, compared to a pandemic peak of 1.16 billion in April 2020. This indicates that, while consumers are now spending less time and money on mobile gaming as they did during the pandemic, the ‘Covid Boom’ has introduced legions of new players to mobile gaming, and those players continue to engage.
India, one of the world’s biggest – and fastest-growing – mobile markets, ruled the roost in terms of downloads, seeing particular success on Google Play with 9.529 billion downloads, compared to just 121 million on the App Store. The United States proved to be the most popular market for iOS, with 2.199 billion downloads. India’s success can be attributed to numerous factors, including an increase in market penetration which has made mobile gaming more accessible than ever before.
Notably, the data suggests that Android platforms saw greater success in terms of downloads, with India, Brazil (4.420 billion), Indonesia (3.374 billion), the USA (2.374 billion), Russia (2.346 billion) and Mexico (2.275 billion) each seeing more fresh installs than the iOS in its most successful market, the United States.
Despite a 12% fall in consumer spending in 2022, the USA topped the charts in terms of consumer spend on both Google Play ($9.669 billion) and iOS ($14.354 billion). China was in a close second place on iOS with $14.347 billion, while Japan, which saw the second highest consumer spend of Google Play, came in at $4.484 billion.
Mobile ad spend is forecast to reach $362 billion in 2023, representing a 7.5% increase from £336 billion in 2022. The report attributes to the fact that “more time than ever before is spent in apps, with total hours on track to surpass four trillion in 2022 on Android phones alone.”
The report also notes that the decline in spending in 2022 disproportionately impacted the performance of top games, with declines in the number of titles exceeding $10 million (897 in 2022 compared to 925 in 2021), $100 million (164 compared to 174 in 2021) and $1 billion (6, compared to 9 in 2021).
Earlier this year, Data.ai released a report which found that mobile game spend is up almost 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels.
