A new report by Sensor Tower forecasts that the mobile gaming industry will see a 2 percent fall in revenue this year.
Throughout the year, multiple companies have reported year-on-year decreases in terms of revenue. However, this trend of decline should be looked at in the context of the pandemic, which saw an unprecedented growth throughout the industry as people around the world sought out new forms of entertainment.
Mobile gaming revenue surged 33 percent year-on-year in Q2 2020 – the largest ever increase. Q2 2021 saw a further year-on-year increase of 8 percent, bringing the total revenue of the mobile gaming industry to $22.6 billion.
Q1 2022 saw the first ever year-on-year decrease in revenue for the mobile gaming market as a whole, and revenue has been shrinking quarter-on-quarter since then. However, the reported revenue for Q2 2022 still stands at around $20 billion – around the same figure as Q2 2020, and significantly above the $15 billion reported in Q2 2019.
Battle of the App Stores
Google Play is projected to see a larger fall in player spending, with Sensor Tower predicting a dip of 8.3 percent year-on-year, reaching $33 billion. In contrast, the app store is forecast to see a slight rise in revenue, from $52 billion to $53 billion.
Despite this slight fall in year-on-year revenue, the mobile gaming sector is still forecast to grow, with Sensor Tower estimating $70 billion of App Store revenue and $47 billion in Google Play revenue by 2026.
H1 2022 saw midcore games leading the way in terms of player spending, with 60 percent. Almost half of this came from the RPG genre, which was ranked as the number one genre by revenue. This was followed by strategy titles, accounting for 36 percent of the midcore market.
Earlier this year, we wrote that midcore games currently account for almost 37 percent of the market share in the USA, being the only genre of mobile gaming to grow its USA market share between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022. In July, GameRefinery reported that midcore titles account for 37 percent of the US market share.
