App Annie has published a report on the situation on the video game market for Q1 2020

Together with IDC, the analytical company App Annie presented a 30-page video game market study. We have highlighted the main thing from the report.

Above all:

• mobile games at the end of the year will earn three times more than PC games or games on consoles;
• 70% of mobile money is games;
• the main money is earned in Asia on all platforms except consoles, for which the main market is the States;
• for commercial success in the market, a real-time multiplayer or a cooperative is necessary;
• the increase in mobile game downloads during the pandemic averaged 40%;
• among the genres, the genre of casual games turned out to be the leader in “quarantined” downloads (Gardenscapes became the most downloaded casual game in Q1 2020);
• most of the time players spend in action games (they account for 40% of the time that gamers spend in mobile games);
• the daily number of Steam users increased by 35 by mid-spring%;
• Discord and Twitch have also grown downloads.

General market situationRemark: App Annie, speaking about the earnings of games, uses the term “user spending”.

It means how much users have spent on game content. It is no longer specified how these funds were distributed further. For a better perception of the text, we used instead phrases such as “revenue”, “earnings”, “sales”. They are not quite correct from the actual point of view, but they are easier to read.

Forecast for 2020 on the video game market

Spending on mobile games at the end of the year will exceed spending on PC/Mac games by 2.8 times and spending on console games by 3.1 times.

The data presented includes both digital and physical sales, but does not take into account the revenue of games from advertisingDynamics of downloads and revenue from the App Store and Google Play

From year to year, games are responsible for an increasing share of downloads, both in the App Store and on Google Play. By the end of Q1 2020, games accounted for about 40% of all mobile downloads. A year ago, it was about 30%.

At the same time, the share of revenue from games relative to other types of applications is falling. But it still remains very high: about 70% of all “mobile money” is games.

The App Store remains the most monetary platform for mobile game developers. Their combined earnings with iOS are 50% more than with Android.

Dynamics of the share of downloads and revenue in mobile by platformDistribution of revenue from games by region

North America in Q1 2020 in annual terms:

• increased the share of revenue from the mobile games market;
• increased the revenue share of games for portable consoles.

In mobile, this was due to a decrease in the share of the Asia-Pacific region (all due to the tightening of the licensing process for games in China). As for the portable set-top boxes market, the growth here is explained by the launch of Switch Lite in Q3 2019.

Distribution of gaming platform revenue by regionDespite the share changes, the main game money, except for the console, is earned in Asia.

The highest – grossing games by the end of Q1 2020

The key factor of commercial success on both mobile and portable platforms is the availability of real—time multiplayer or cooperative games, according to App Annie. Most of the games at the top of the box office charts have either the first or the second.

The top 5 highest-grossing games by platform, the asterisk indicates those games that have either multiplayer or cooperative mode
App Annie does not pay attention to this, but if you look at the charts by country, you can clearly see that they are seriously different.

Only the tops of the USA and the UK are almost identical, but the leaders of other countries differ, there is no homogeneity.

Top 5 highest-grossing mobile games by countryThe impact of coronavirus

The situation with downloads

App Annie saw an increase in mobile game downloads during self-isolation in all countries. The dynamics strongly depended on the region, but rarely exceeded 40%. The peak growth of weekly game downloads was observed in Spain — 65%.

The methodology was as follows: the company’s analysts compared the average weekly downloads of January 2020 with the analogous indicators of the following months. The difference was the growth.

During the pandemic, weekly downloads of mobile games in the world reached a record 1.2 billion.

Weekly downloads of games by country during the pandemic

App Annie also told which game genres dominated by downloads and by the amount of time spent in them (based on data obtained from Google Play). Actually, the most downloaded genre turned out to be casual games. They accounted for about 13% of all game downloads. Moreover, the increase in their downloads during quarantine also turned out to be one of the most significant — by 0.4 percentage points compared to October-December 2019.

Top 5 genres leading in downloads (Google Play)

As for the genre, which is the leader in terms of the time spent in it by players, here the palm is for action games. They account for 40% of the time spent by players in mobile projects. Most of all gamers are sitting in PUBG.

Top 5 genres leading in terms of time spent in them (Google Play)
The Steam audience also grew during the pandemic.

The daily number of users by spring increased by 35%, and one—time online – by 41%. Moreover, the main surge coincided with the announcement of quarantine in the United States.

DAU and online Steam in the world
Against the background of the pandemic, not only game downloads have grown.

The indicators of Discord and Twitch also showed steady growth.

Dynamics of daily downloads of Discord and Twitch from the App Store for iPhoneIs there any news?