Infographics: 2020 in numbers
The end of 2020 is not far off. In honor of this, our colleagues from GamesIndustry showed the final figures of the gaming industry in their infographic.
The main figure of the report is $174.9 billion. That’s how much the gaming market has earned in total this year. Moreover, $86.3 billion of them fell on mobile, which is almost half of the total revenue (49%).
Most of the gamers’ expenses came from digital retail. Digital games are responsible for $158 billion, while physical copies generated only $14.9 billion.
The infographic notes that FIFA 21 and Animal Crossing: New Horizons became the record holders this year both in terms of the number of copies sold and the volume of revenue (in the UK).
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was also the best selling console game in the Asian market. GamesIndustry writes about this with reference to Famitsu data.
In the USA, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War showed the biggest sales at the end of November, and the new Animal Crossing took only third place in the top. However, the revenue of the Nintendo hit in the “figure” is not taken into account here.
GamesIndustry also reviewed the reviews on Metacritic. The most highly rated game for the year was Persona 5 Royal, which received 95 points. But the worst game of the year was Tiny Racer — he scored only 32 points.
In terms of the number of new releases and the number of games on new IP in 2020, Nintendo was in the lead. The company has released 19 projects, two of which are new brands. Approximately the same number of fresh franchises have been launched by other major developers.
GamesIndustry also told which games were most often written about this year, which of them were most actively Googled, and which became the most popular on YouTube. These lists have little overlap with each other. For example, Among Us and Fall Guys led the top in online search, Fortnite and Cyberpunk 2077 led the top in mentions, and Minecraft and Roblox led the top in video reviews.
The most popular YouTube bloggers are also noted in the infographic. Flamingo had the most subscribers — 1.7 billion.
Most often in 2020, Final Fantasy XIV, the new Animal Crossing and Cyberpunk 2077 were discussed on Twitter. And the trailers or broadcasts of Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone and Mortal Kombat 11 gathered the most views on the network.
Separately, GamesIndustry named the figures for the mobile segment, based on Sensor Tower data. This year, Voodoo became the best publisher by the number of downloads, and Tencent by revenue. The title with the largest number of installations turned out to be Garena Free Fire, and with the biggest earnings — PUBG Mobile. And despite the fact that Indian gamers downloaded games the most actively, the Americans were the most generous with purchases in 2020.
The infographic also shows how often British console players buy consoles from different companies. For example, owners of the Nintendo Switch also have a PS4 in 60% of cases and an Xbox One in 51%.
As a special gift, GamesIndustry told about which animals are kept by the staff of the publication. Most of all they employ dog lovers (240), and cat owners took an honorable second place (165).
Finally, the portal left a random set of interesting numbers that were not included in other charts. Among other things, it noted how many Chinese gamers in total (720 million), how much the gaming industry has invested in the fight against COVID-19 ($160 million) and how much gaming companies and their communities have invested in extinguishing fires in Australia ($5.5 million).
The original post with the full infographic can be found at this link.
GamesIndustry was based mainly on open data from analytical companies (Newzoo, Sensor Tower, NPD Group, and so on).
