Session: State Of Gaming - Josh Skinner, Sensor Tower

Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] I would like to welcome Josh Skinner from Sensor Tower and he's going to be talking about the state of gaming. So please welcome Josh. [Applause] Thanks Charlie. Hey everyone. Um, I'm going to roll with the uh the walk-in mic today cuz I like to stroll about. Um, my name is Josh. I'm from Sense Tower. For those of you who aren't aware what Sense Tower

is or what we do, um, we try our best to track the mobile digital economy. Um, so today a lot of the the data that I'm going to go through is is tracking the mobile economy um, from a gaming perspective and also a general um, app market overview. outside of mobile as well. Sensar is also a provider of PC console data and we recently acquired a company to be able to provide this data. So if anybody does ever have any questions on the PC console space and ple please feel free to ask at the end or or catch me after. Is there a clicker up here guys? This one Does anybody have a clicker? Sorry. Perfect. So, the first thing I'm going to start with is is starting to

understand what's happened in the in the mobile gaming space. Um, and then we'll start to look at what we feel is going to happen in the mobile gaming space. Um, and also mobile as a whole. In terms of 2024, one of the key themes that we saw is is that mobile gaming returned to this growth patch. We had the COVID boom. We had a bit of um resistance and tough time in the market. And in 2024, we started to see this increase. In fact, we saw 4% year-on-year increase in mobile game inapp purchases. We also saw casual games driving the largest growth in the West with 9% increase in in casual inapp purchase revenue across US and Europe. And one of the biggest things we saw is developers really start to increase their focus on live service in mobile, but also outside of that with 84% of mobile game inapp purchase revenue coming from um audiences um kind of with this this live live service um focus. We saw the growth of hybrid casual in 2024 and we saw the

monetization um adoption on the rise um within there from some of the largest publishers. We also saw Tik Tok and Apploving grow their share of voice. Tik Tok becoming a prominent network um for mobile gaming and we saw the hyper casual ad creative strategies were adopted to increase that growth across the market that we see there too. Next slide. So, the first thing I'm going to hop into is downloads and revenue worldwide and see what happened across the year and leading up to today. On the downside, one thing we did see is worldwide downloads decline. Okay, this doesn't mean the market is is all declining. There's definitely some positives to come for this which we'll touch upon. On the left hand side, we can see the general kind of apps and

game downloads across the app store and Google Play with a 1% decline. But on the gaming side, we saw more of a a decline in downloads. We resonate with the cost of installs here, the cost of attracting new users as to why we saw this decline in downloads across 2024. And really where we pinpointed this download decline was into the casual space. As you can see here, casual was down 17% worldwide in 2024. And we saw the growth in hybrid casual with 3% increase that we see across the market within there. On the left hand side, we can see year-over-year of the share of global downloads where those increases may have come from and where those decreases also came from. However, downloads did decline, but they didn't in the Middle East. We saw a marginal increase in the Middle East on downloads. And I think that that resonates what Chris was just saying earlier on with the Middle East becoming more of a a gaming hub as time comes on.

And I expect to see this growth increase um year over year. But it's important to take that away outside of the Middle East where we saw kind of the key down uh the key kind of um decreases. We saw North America at 7% year-on-year in downloads and Latin America also at 8%. However, the important thing to take away from all of this is although downloads are declining and we're seeing a decline in the market, we are actually seeing this consumer spend growth happening across the market. On the left hand side again looking at apps and games, we can see the 13% increase happening across the general app market and 3.8% in the gaming um consumer spending. This is across both stores and in 2024. And I think this gives us a really good foundation to build from into 2025 and beyond as this growth is increasing despite this download um decline that we're seeing across the

market. As I mentioned, we saw the growth of hybrid casual in gaming and we can clearly see this with the hybrid casual growth looking at AP revenue. a staggering 37% looking into the hybrid casual model and we can see this hybrid casual model clearly work within the space and took um some of the um market share in 2024 across the global AP revenue. We can see you know across the last three years a 1% incremental increase from 2022 to 23 to 24 from the hybrid casual um monetization uh model. IoP revenues are growing as I mentioned outside of Asia. We don't see that growth right now in Asia from the last year. But what we do see from the Middle East is the highest percentage growth. This resonates with the downloads with a small growth. But the important thing is that the revenue is driving. In the Middle East, we saw an 18% year-on-year revenue growth within

the mobile space, particularly in gaming. And outside of that, the closest that we see is Europe. So I think there's great opportunity within the Middle East as has been touched upon and it's something that we expect to see grow year on year throughout. We're going to jump into something um more specific outside of kind of key download and growth metrics and start to look at genre and audiences. A part of a data set the Sensab provide you in the mobile space is understanding your audience, your competitor's audience and the genres within there. going to start with North America. And what we're breaking into here is starting to understand by consumer spend the growth that we are seeing across different genres. We can see the the the most the highest increase that we see is is lifestyle at 42% within the US. And you'll see throughout the next slide in the different regions how this really differs from region to region. And I think it's a really key takeaway to

understand about which region works best in which genre and how you can take this away to inform your strategies going forward within the mobile gaming space. Outside of lifestyle, we also saw strong growth in strategy and puzzle and also casino within the US and North America. RPG, interestingly, we did see that deep decline. Let's focus more on Europe and we see the picture kind of change quite a lot here from North America to U to Europe in terms of consumer spend strategy and lifestyle kind of again really took the lead here but outside of that there was consumer spend growth across all genres really outside of RPG within Asia we see the RPG growth um consumer spend decline interestingly yearon year sports are declining but where we see a strong increase is lifestyle and action and this is down to some of the two some of the key games that were released within the market in 2024 in terms of why we see this

growth. Focusing more now on the Middle East and understanding where this consumer spend growth has come from. The slide before we saw 18% year-on-year growth which was quite um staggering takeaway in terms of percentage. We can start to understand where this is coming from. Strategy games are clearly leading the um the spend and the revenue within the Middle East. But not only are they leading it, they're also growing. The 38% growth year is something to take away within this market. But also, it's it's worth mentioning looking at action as well, understanding the 22% growth that we're seeing within there and where else opportunities may also be. We also see close to the 38% of puzzle in the Middle East and it sets the precedent on where the trends are within the Middle Eastern market in terms of consumer spend growth year on year. In terms of breakout games in 2024 and starting to understand the spend

growth across these, it's interesting to see that of course we had some some great titles released in 2024, but also looking at the revenue before 2024 comparable to 2024 revenue and where we can understand. So, Last War Survival of course taking most of their revenue within 2024 being their year and we can see the other kind of games floating in behind there and understanding pre-2024 to post 2024. In terms of launch date, this is always an interesting one and something that sens that we're asked about. Is it worth me launching a new game into this market? Is it going to work or are we um fighting with with these evergreen titles? What we can see in the in the green chart here is is that games that launched in 2024 and years before still, you know, reached kind of new heights. Okay, we almost got close to the the 20 heights of of 2021 in terms of new games launched for for revenue. But what we

can see is these evergreen titles that have been released five plus years ago are still continuing to drive strong revenues across the market. And these evergreen titles are really taking that on. Let's dig into the audience. As I mentioned at Zenstar, we have um a data set around audiences. And we'll start on the left hand side here. We break down audiences by personas and then start to look at their monthly active users within the gaming space. What we can see here is for example, let's take fast foodies. We're able to understand those personas resonating with fast foodies. They order from fast food apps, etc. Which games do they play the most? And we can then resonate this with top monthly active users for example. So we can see these top gaming uh top non-gaming game personas and see which games they play. Outside of this we can also get a breakdown of demographics. On the left hand side we can start to understand through casino and puzzle what is the demographic split that we see there and

also into age buckets. We can see the ages um playing these individual games and these individual genres throughout. Now let's break into some publisher trends and start to understand within the gaming market these publishers um how does this look in terms of market concentration by publisher we start to understand how this how the different markets look on a subg genre level. Okay, how saturated is a particular genre from a particular publisher and where does this change? Interestingly, with RPG, we can kind of see the split pretty open here with, you know, one publisher taking 9.1% and the rest of the the um the rest of the market concentration really being split out within here. Break it down, of course, to geoloccation with Niantic kind of leading the market there um and taken that in. We also have this breakdown on um a geographical level if anybody would ever like to see that as well.

Outside of gaming, I think it's important to understand the general mobile consumer behavior trends. What's happening in the mobile space as a whole outside of our gaming space and what takeaways that we can take from that? Looking at time spent levels in some markets, we start to understand time spent by hours. Where is the time spent growth coming from on mobile as a whole and where is it potentially declining? India takes the lead on here in terms of growth yearon-year into 2024 with a crazy 14% growth of time spent on hours on mobile. Okay, this is general not just within the gaming space. We also see Brazil who's often looked at as a as a growing market within the gaming space. We see that 1% growth in terms of time spent and further down some European markets where we see growth. Interestingly, where we see decline and the key thing that we see here is this is iOS only is we actually see a 6%

decline in time spent um in China on overall um apps within the market. In terms of time spent on social media, again out of the gaming space, we see this 4% growth year for social media apps worldwide. However, if we take it to the bottom right hand side, we actually see a decline in the US for social media. Okay, this tells us that potentially in the the overall space in the US, people are stepping away from social media and focusing their time on other apps because there was time spent growth in the US. However, for time spent on social media, we see the decline within here. Interestingly, and I know Chris mentioned it, AI will be mentioned shortly. AI chatbots, we are seeing this increase um across the market for obvious reasons. Let's hop into some AI on mobile as a as a whole and see how that has changed across the gaming space, but

overall, of course, AI chatbots have been the breakout sub genre for download in the overall app market in 2024. And we can see that kind of quite staggering increase there. And we can see also the decreases within there. We understand that AI apps are already becoming already are a billion dollar industry. Okay. And I think it's important to see how this resonates in the overall gaming market and how we start to see this within the mobile market too. In 2024 alone, 1.49 49 billion downloads for generative AI apps that we're seeing. We saw a year-on-year growth, more so in 2023, but we're still starting to see this growth within 2024. This slide for me is is an interesting takeaway that we see around AI. We don't just see it in um in gaming, productivity, lifestyle, and

finance. We see it across the whole market. Now, 2023 really the breakout year. 2024 we also have seen this come through but interestingly AI in mobile its highest point of mention or in mobile games was in 2017 of course we still see it mentioned and and evolved within games in 2024 but it's other areas and other categories within our app store where we're seeing the growth of AI spread across all of it. So, some themes for 2025 and some that um I've touched upon and some that have have kind of been mentioned. We really believe that there will be kind of a strong return to growth. I think we seen a download decline last year, but we saw revenue growth. We expect the mobile market to really increase in 2025 and even after Q1, we're starting to see that. We believe that most of this will come for kind of bigger publishers and evergreen titles. However, we still see great opportunity for newer titles and smaller publishers within the

market. Again, something Chris touched upon really acceleration to new revenue. Um, one thing Sensstar has done to pivot with the market is look outside of mobile. Now, we're providing PC console data um and other and also looking into other web stores and we really see in 2025 this theme come through stronger than ever. It's something that's been mentioned in the last couple of years, but I truly believe this will go further. And also one thing we're seeing and customers that we work with and the questions that were asked around data is the reliance on IPs and pre predefined audiences. We've already seen some acquisitions happening within the market to tap into um already used IPs and audiences to ensure that um UA costs can be kept to a minimum. But we expect to see IP collaboration become more um more important within our space. Cool. If anybody has any questions, I think we are going to take

a couple. We have a couple of minutes. We've got two minutes to take any questions if anybody does have any. If not, feel free to catch me around. Go for it. It's just coming. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. uh for this presentation. So uh the question is um maybe I missed the first slides uh but is there any vision of what is web free gaming going into let's talk about like casual gaming not tap to earn things of telegram but uh you know that there are more and more systems on salana on tonico systems and yeah maybe you have a take on that as well because you gave wonderful figures for the mobile industry and thank you very much for the analysis of uh the Asian region and mana region growth. Yeah. But what what would be your take for the web three games? Thank you so much. Yeah, sure. Um yeah, so web 3 um isn't something we you know we have a full data set on but we are able to understand we can kind of get a pulse

within the industry to understand how web 3 is potentially performing in in region. Um, I think overall what we're seeing is from a customer perspective that we work with, web 3 is a question that we're being asked more and more and a trend that we're seeing. Um, so I guess from a qualitative perspective, it's a trend that we're seeing within the market in terms of kind of on a quantitative and data side. Um, it's not something that that we kind of fully track, but it's something we can certainly get a pulse on. Um, but yeah, I can follow up on that with you for sure. one at the back. Charlie, keep your hand up. Whoever that was over there. Hey. Hi. Uh I noticed that uh you said that social media uh the influence is declining but what we have seen in gaming is that we are losing out to uh

so many short form content like shorts, reels and a lot of audiences moving towards that especially the younger audience. Sure. Uh what is your take on that? Because the data that you showed uh kind of indicated uh something differently. Yeah, sure. because that was a narrative in the industry over the last year that we are losing to short form content. Sure. Yeah, that's a really good question and maybe something I should caveat. So, in terms of our data set, really what we're looking at is 18 plus. So, that potentially could be where you know the players that you're losing potentially, you know, under 18. However, I think the different markets for social media are changing. We saw a decline in the US um but globally we saw kind of a shorter increase. So I think market to market it really is differing. I think there's a few reasons why the US is declining outside of the mobile market more influences um political influences around that. Um but I think markettomarket we're not necessar um the the kind of same trend as the US.

Um so we see some increases we see some some decline but again I'll be happy to kind of look into individual markets with you and and we can kind of work out from your perspective what that looks like. Sure. So yeah, we've just run out of time for questions now. Can we give Josh a round of applause, please? Thanks everybody. [Music] [Music]