Game On or Game Over: Level Up Your Gaming Strategy

we're here at the global trends track kindly sponsored by app annie so here's a message from our sponsor hello everyone and welcome to today's session with app annie uh today we're gonna be going over a number of interesting market trends that we have observed over the first three quarters of 2021. before we jump into um just want to highlight that penny is a mobile market estimate service provider and we're not a investment advisor so everything we're going to show you here today is obviously estimates and then we're going to drive into those different trends that we're observing um quick intro for me my name is tattoo i'm a senior account manager here at the penny and also we're looking a lot of

gaming customers across mea we've been the company for around five years now so and um apenny itself has been around the market for over 10 years and obviously we're working with a lot of different gaming companies across europe and across the world as well with that let's directly jump into mobile gaming market trends right so the first one i want to show you guys is uh basically the new normal that we're seeing um for a lot of times um you know in the beginning everyone thought that this would be like a covet related new norm they would see you see those spikes in the charts during the beginning of the pandemic and the lockdown but what we're seeing is that the increased engagement increased number of downloads revenue and also time spent is remaining and what we're seeing is the crazy numbers over 1 billion downloads over 1.7 billion in consumer spend and over 5 billion hours spent per week on mobile

games globally right obviously we do see a bit of a decline here and then in the hours spent however what's most important is the consumer spend and the remaining and growth that that we're still observing to further highlight that if you look at the average weekly consumer spending mobile games uh over the last uh three uh three years in q3 you can see 35 increase in q3 2021 so that just shows you then kind of confirms the increased interest in mobile games um if you look at some of the top games worldwide obviously you see quite variety across the downloads consumer spend and monthly active users um you know if you look at download side my talking angela 2 that was released in q3 had a tremendous launch you obviously have a lot of hyper casual games are still dominating in terms of the

in terms of downloads however you see free fire pubg mobile subway surfer roblox candy crush there as well in terms of consumer spend obviously roblox has been absolutely killing it uh in 2021 and in q3 they also came in number one gangshin impact is there pokemon go had a big jump as you can see six positions up um and then you have the likes of you know coinmaster honor of kings etc etc and then monthly active users you have usual suspects like pubg mobile roblox and candy crush now if you look at on the the breakout games right so the the games that had the best quarter over quarter growth um obviously you have my talk ninja obviously they had tremendous launch as mentioned but then you have a lot of uh hyper casual games in with the 3d in in the title so they know a lot of runner games a lot of kind of shooting arrow type of games that we've seen on the market

the consumer spend sign the number one position is quite interesting uh odin valhalla rising this is a korea specific game that is only available in korea that has been absolutely killing it um and then you have number of uh interesting ips there of harry potter magic awaken has been performing really really well and then you have royal match as well that is being uh you know talk of a lot of a lot of different people in the market and then monthly active users they gain a lot of hyper casual my talking angela 2 also sitting on the top there um looking at the top mea hq publishers worldwide revenues so you have usual suspects playwright supercell platicom an active still front um yeah all of those guys performing really really well if you look at the breakdown there's a lot of israeli publishers there a lot of nordics and russia belarus etc

um top market so this one is quite interesting so as you can see russia has actually become the top market in terms of downloads in q3 and they had three percent growth quarter over quarter um turkey number one number two and had a slight decline then you have france uk germany the usual kind of the big european markets but what's interesting is the consumer spend right in terms of consumer spend um you see the germany uk fronts which everyone would expect to be on the top right there the traditional european markets are always driving consumer spend but you see now russia appearing in number number four position right and that's 14 growth quarter over quarter so what that means is basically russia is already number one market in terms of downloads and then it also catching up with top european markets in terms of consumer spend right so russia soon will be one of the most lucrative markets in europe

to to you know operate and acquire users in for your games um and then the rest uh you have the usual ones you have uh you know italy netherlands spain etc etc as you can see majority of the markets did have a decline in consumer spending q3 but that's kind of normal because of the you know summer time usually q3 is at the most quiet period and then the q4 everything picks up as the holiday season kicks in um now we can jump into straight to specific genre trends that we have observed in order to do that we have actually we're leveraging our game iq taxonomy that we've curated to better understand what mobile gaming genres and sub genres are growing or declining um and with that in this in this view we're looking at the fastest genres over the last three quad the three quarters from download and um and active user perspective right so

as you can see hyper casual you know still dominating still number one you see the last three-quarter trend here so they're you know they're still growing in terms of active users in terms of downloads the the most uh interesting one and the one that had the biggest jump in active users was simulation genre they've had tremendous q2 to q3 jump as you can see here action games also had a great jump uh and then you have match and the rest of the bunch there as well in terms of the monetization right and here we're talking about uh the in-app revenue so in this view we're looking at revenue versus active active users um and again we're looking at in-app revenue so that's why you're not seeing hyper casual games uh you know high up obviously they monetize you know 99 of their monetization is coming through ads um but you see the likes of simulation games action games match etc however the the r2 leaders basically are rpg games

right so they are able to drive the most revenue um based on the the active users that they have the and then you have uh strategy games also not so not far behind them and then casino games is quite interesting they don't have a lot of users right they don't have the high user user base however they were able to monetize that user page really really well um lastly if you look at basically the uh specific sub-genres and their specific growth and we're looking at in europe specifically now um you can see that uh by revenue is uh 4x marked battle strategy games uh you know being number one and they had 14 year-over-year growth then you have m3 meta team battle even though they had slight decline however you can see that they're still number three and they have m3 meta and three saga in the top five and the slots casino games also appearing in the top

five uh in terms of downloads no surprise here hyper casual making up uh four or four out of the top five uh most downloaded sub genres when you have kids other games also made kind of filling up the number four position um and then the rest you have driving games simulation sports games pack simulation games etc etc um now if you do a bit of a deep dive into what are the demographics that are driving these sub genres right you can clearly see that there are uh some genres are clearly male drivens and some generals are clearly female driven right um and then what's interesting is that for the male driven genres which would be your strategy sports racing shooting rpg and action games um it's always the younger demographic or gen z that is the most dominant demographic that we observe while if you look at the female

driven games or female driven genres that would be your match games puzzle tabletop games simulation casino and even hyper casual actually um then you'll see much more diversity in the demographic right so you do have the gen z you have the boomers you have millennials there as well so it's quite a bit more diverse when it comes to female driven games now the next one here we're going to look into different ways that you can basically optimize your game and better understand how certain games are performing uh better than the other games right um and we looked at three different examples of how you can understand from monetization their perspective or engagement perspective or time span perspective how certain games are driving their performance right um in this case uh you know we're looking at driving engagement and the example we want to use here is

that the poker games right so everyone knows the top two biggest poker games out there which would be from you know zynga and then the world series of poker by playtica but when we looked at the average sessions per user and average time per user we saw that it's actually well it was the governor of poker 3 that was driving the most engagement in the games uh in their game so that's that was kind of interesting uh stat to see so we decided to investigate what could be the reason behind that right and when i went to the um you know game iq tag to understand what are the features that one game has versus another game it was clear that uh you know governor poker 3 was using a quite unusual uh social social uh aspect of the game which would be guilds and clans and corporate development tasks for a poker game right so this these are you know building clans quite normal in

strategy games but uh it's the only poker game that we saw out of the old bunch that was actually using this social you know aspect of the gaming and it's quite interesting how that has actually resulted in increased engagement so that is just one simple example the next one we're looking at rpd right so revenue per download and i was looking at empire simulation rpg game uh rpg games and then you have game of sultans and king throne right and you can clearly see that game of sultans has pretty much almost double the rpd of the the kingstrom right and again this is interesting to see the games are quite similar um to understand like hey what are the differences between the two games and here again we went through game iq tags and we looked at the monetization aspects now right so and what we saw is that game of thrones has actually multiple soft currencies

and uh also uses uh you know and rewarding video as a monetization mechanic so it clearly shows you the the differences as well as actually cosmetics right so um and it clearly shows you that two games are taking a very different type of approach in terms of the monetization in terms of how they want to engage and monetize their audience right so again this gives you an idea why that there is such a big gap and the lastly we looked at the d1 retention right so everyone in the industry is looking at the retention how can we make the users stay in the game or come back to the game more frequently and how can we increase that and in this case we're looking at some of you know top three biggest battle royale games or shooting games out there so you have free fire call of duty and pubg mobile and um you know when we looked at d1 retention on android specifically we saw that uh free fire was actually performing better than

the other bunch right um and you know they've been consistently up there have been few months where you know quality was better but then they again overtook them and in this case we were like okay what is the main what is the biggest influence of d1 retention right and it's actually the first time you are boarding right so whenever the user downloads the ad what's the experience they're getting with the with the with the game in the first you know 10 15 20 minutes um and when we looked at that it was quite shockingly big difference uh between these three games if you look at free fire they're pretty much done with the tutorial after like four minutes right um they don't push any you know monetization that have push any customization they don't they don't force you to do anything they just straight away give you a quick tutorial and afterwards they let you to play the game and then everything else happens after that while in pubg mobile and call of duty

you see that the onboardings are quite a bit longer first of all and then second of all you know there's a lot of um you know different stuff that they're trying to push like customization you know try to even monetize the user within the first few minutes right so this could be one of the reasons why uh for example free fire has a better d1 retention because the user can get to the game play much faster and not be stuck in the in the different loops and customizations and monetization etc um with that we actually conclude our today session so if you guys want to you know check out more from my penny feel free to reach out to different representatives that we have globally and we'll see you soon you