Start your week right with our quick take on the stories that are impacting the mobile industry right now.
To help get you primed and ready for another week in mobile gaming, we’ve curated the biggest stories you need to know from the last seven days.
1) 20 years of Monster Hunter: Capcom celebrates two goliath decades in 2024
Monster Hunter’s series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto released a statement thanking fans for two decades of support as the franchise fast approaches its 20th anniversary, whilst highlighting the current roster of games keeping players busy across platforms. Monster Hunter Now is the mobile option, of course, with 10 million installs and $100 million revenue behind it after only a matter of months.
Indeed, Monster Hunter has come a long way from its PS2 origins, having landed on every major gaming system since from the Wii to 3DS, Xbox One to PC, and, naturally, mobile.
2) Unity to lay off 1,800 staff as it continues company reset
Unity is laying off approximately 1,800 staff, or 25% of its entire workforce globally, as restructuring plans continue. This latest round of layoffs will have an impact on all teams, regions and areas of Unity, with most redundancies expected to take place within the first quarter of the year.
Unity is looking to make “profitable growth”, though has found itself in a less than popular position since announcing the Runtime Fee – a plan to charge developers whose games are built on Unity for installs. It received so much backlash that plans ultimately had to be changed.
3) Playtika to cut 300 – 400 more jobs in latest rounds of layoffs
More layoffs are coming from Playtika with another 10% of employees being let go, though the main Israeli offices aren’t expected to be affected with Israel remaining a key performer in the global games industry.
The 300-400 coming redundancies follow over 850 job losses in 2022 and a year-on-year stock price fall for the company.
4) 2023 saw record highs in time spent on mobile and almost half a million app installs every minute
In the State of Mobile 2024 report, data.ai highlighted five key statistics from the mobile landscape like how 257 billion app installs took place in 2023, equating to almost 500,000 every minute. $171 billion of in-app spending took place in 2023 too, with a 6% rise in time spent on apps.
It was non-gaming apps that underpinned the year’s success, increasing in revenues 20 times over since 2014. There was still growth on the gaming side, though at a much slower rate.
5) China and US accounted for more than 50% of the $107 billion spent on mobile games in 2023
Also from data.ai’s report, stats were revealed around regional spending differences and genre preferences. Spending came predominantly from the US and China in 2023 with $23.92 billion and $37.63 billion respectively.
The UK spent $2.19 billion on mobile games and, while a fraction of the revenues from much larger territories, this in fact marked the second-highest year for consumer spending on games in the region. Japan, meanwhile, spent six times as much despite making fewer total downloads.
