State of Mobile Gaming 2022

next up we have a speaker from app annie and one of the joys of being the editor at pocketgamer is seeing the data and seeing the numbers we've had some big sort of top line figures for the growth of the sector the value of mobile gaming the size of the m a market but it's when you actually drill down into some of the numbers for individual games developers publishers you really start to appreciate just how incredibly diverse and fascinating this market is and the next speaker the next company are one that i'm privileged enough to see a lot of the data up front and it's going to be a real joy to hear our next speaker carl who will be talking about the state of the mobile gaming sector in 2022 from app annie uh rather than delay any further carl you ready to go carl knights wow that's definitely your introduction that that kind of invited that uh applause

before i've said anything so thank you uh thank you very much i can see there's still a few people coming in um how wonderful to be here in person again first time for me for a couple of years and um yeah delighted to uh delighted to be here so um as introduced um my name is carl knights i'm managing director of apani across emea for those of you familiar with us um we are the market leading third party intelligence provider for the mobile industry and the timing of this event is perfect um each year we provide at the start of the year our state of mobile report and so that's what i'm going to be sharing with you today and really in that what did we see in 2021 what can we take from that in terms of the implications for 2022 um before i start i need to share this disclaimer that what we are sharing are estimates and are not intended to be used for any investment decisions these are just a small collection of the um customers that we're privileged to

work with on a day-to-day basis i must say that we work with companies of all sizes in all different stages of their growth journey and um yeah my team is just outside the door here on the left and we'd we'd love to chat to you about how we can how we can help you so let's get into it so this is kind of a high level um view of um the mobile sector across across 2021 what did we see firstly from a download perspective 230 billion downloads in 2021 year on year that's an increase of around 5 around 13 versus kind of pre-pandemic levels i'll keep using that as a reference point as we go through a number of uh different perspectives um and there's really a story here that you know while download growth was perhaps not as dramatic as we have seen certainly the growth in spend was so year over year 2021 on 2020 19 42 versus pre-pandemic levels so reaching 170 billion in uh in 2021.

interestingly for this audience mobile gaming occupied 68 of that uh of that mobile ad spend whenever we release this uh this report each year what tends to grab the headlines is the um just how much time are we all spending so uh the bbc cnn always tend to pick up on just how much of our lives are dominated by uh spending it on our on our mobile devices um aggregated and analyzed across the top 10 markets that's at 4.8 hours a day so nearly a third of our waking time now spent with our spent with our mobile devices and we'll have a look in a moment to see exactly how that changes from uh from country to country i'm sure some of you in this room are invested in the daily red water and challenge of acquiring new users uh no doubt that is what is driving the mobile ad spend to be just shy of 300 billion now in in 2021 an increase of 23 year-over-year and again we expect that to be around kind of 350 billion by the end of this year so um all for the reason of getting

to that position of um uh and um which as we saw in 2021 now 233 that generate in excess of 100 million uh in uh in spend uh each year okay so let's uh let's kind of take a look in in terms of time hopefully you can see that relatively clearly what we're looking at there is a spread of different countries um and the change in time um in terms of hours spent on mobile per day so i'll still this be a stone cold great icebreaker for the room so let's see if this goes well let's see if we can test the accuracy of our estimates and see some people are on their phones already so would you care to anybody to shout out your average daily screen time do i have a volunteer i can see this just anybody what you're an hour and 40 minutes very good three hours 4.4 hours that's a bit more like it any others anymore nine hours there we go that's kind of

what i expected for that so we see the entire range is there but um but but as you can see um growth year on year was was slightly slightly slower so not the same impact that we saw in 2020 but as i said kind of aggregated and analyzed across the top ten markets it now equates to uh four hours and uh 4.8 hours a day interestingly it's on the right-hand side china there you see actually decreased in time uh over 2021 to 2020 we believe that's the impact of the restrictions placed by china on under 18 gaming so that's starting to uh have an impact there okay if we have a look at um look at time from another perspective in terms of our overall kind of minutes uh minutes per day and um what we're looking at here is a kind of a perspective across 15 quarters four years um so the majority of time is still spent in kind of social and uh and communication that continues to be um the majority of the time however the relative growth in

that sector as you can see has not been as dramatic as photo and video and entertainment from a very small base that have doubled in total hours uh in the last in the last four years the encouraging thing is that gaming has kept pace there so still occupying one in every uh in every 10 minutes um and i think what this kind of talks to aside from you know long periods of time spent in in core games is you know the the ease and accessibility of casual hyper-casual games the joy that can be derived from relatively short periods of time gaming is what is sustaining uh gaming still being one in every 10 minutes okay um [Music] probably the most overused phrase during uh the last few years is the new normal but there generally was a new normal um when it came to um what we saw in terms of download consumer spend and uh and hours in in mobile games globally in 2021 so there was this moment in time in march 2020 when uh total downloads exceeded 1 billion in a

week and they never really dropped aside from maybe you know a couple of weeks they're really sustained at that level and have continued to grow fairly steadily potentially bringing new gamers potentially just the um you know natural progression of um of some gamers maturing but obviously what followed then is a much more dramatic rise in in consumer spend that reaching in excess of 1.7 billion dollars in one week in the early part of 2021 and again it hasn't really fallen below that level um for the last uh for the last six seven months ours again remained kind of north of five billion for the majority of the time kind of equaling out through the latter part of last year but then that kind of uptick towards the end of the year in response to a lot of the blockbuster releases of last year uh league of legends wild rift pubg um really kind of driving those hours in excess of 6 billion in the latter part of the year so um yeah what do we take from that really

well you know the gaming community has only grown they've stuck around and they're feeling more and more comfortable with uh with spending spending in games and that doesn't look like slowing up anytime soon because in terms of the total games released in 2021 it's enormous so around 2 million apps and games were released in uh 2021 15 of those uh were from mobile games so what is that 300 000 a year roughly 800 a day 5 000 a week um 77 uh attributed to uh google play so again what does this say a democratization of of creating games and publishing them is alive and well it's not just the big studios that uh that have that opportunity and innovation coming from absolutely everywhere around the world but if we do look at that kind of top end of the of the market some of the big studios the big games um increased significantly year over year so again around 20 20

growth year on year in terms of um the total number of apps that generated in excess of 100 million dollars in spend each year there's around 233 globally and 75 of those are coming from mobile games so 174 are generated in excess of 100 million in in 2021 and so just to kind of wrap um i suppose this perspective and the trend that um you know i think i've touched on once or twice which is a okay a slight slowing in terms of download growth but that continued scale increase in terms of consumer spend this really uh is pretty consistent for most markets that you will look at um and really what does this say um as we were just as i was just saying in terms of the comfort with um with spending within games the way that we see it it tends to be the kind of the gateway the first place you're ever likely to to spend in an app is likely to be in a mobile game and then from there potentially other subscriptions with

other services i think also what we're seeing is is games becoming even more sophisticated understanding the motivations and the dynamics required in order to uh in order to get gamers to uh to spend within that within those games so um a trend we expect to see continue through 20 uh 2022 um expecting that spent to be something more like 140 billion by the end of this year okay um i want to take a moment now to kind of look more holistically at the overall kind of gaming sector and you know uh clearly the you know the rising tide of of all aspects of gaming not just uh not just mobile games if you can kind of cast your mind back to march 2020 around here when um getting hold of a playstation or an xbox or a nintendo switch just about the hardest thing uh hardest thing on the planet um i remember there was a teenager in new jersey called max

hayden he made 1.7 million dollars uh reselling uh game playstations and xboxes online so good for max um and uh and we saw a similar thing in terms of gaming on pc as well uh what you're looking at there is a worldwide daily concurrent and in-game steam user so just this collective rise and passion around around gaming right i'm sure you're all committed and live and breathe that um every day but no doubt that with the kind of you know cross-platform play capabilities really the blurring of the lines between exactly what device gamers are on and whether they ultimately ultimately care what's really driving them is that connection with people that they care about that connection with playing the games that they love and uh no doubt that you know the phase that we are in now is driving some of the best um gaming experiences that um that we've ever seen unlikely that the the only one that majority of the world will ever experience will be will be mobile gaming

um this point in 2014 when mobile gaming first overtook pc and uh and home consoles obviously that growth has been dramatic over the last uh over the last seven years now in excess of 3x the size of uh of either pc or um or home consoles but again you know to talk to that kind of cross-platform play um component is that the experience and the quality that frankly is expected by uh gamers now within a mobile environment has risen to enormous uh enormous levels the budget for extension impact uh 100 100 million dollars i believe uh when they launched um we expect to see that uh continue again as the as the as the lines are blurs really between devices and it's about you know as i say playing the game that you love with the people that you are with the people that you care about so if you want to take a a quick look into some of the games that really drove a lot of the growth that we've uh i've

been talking about uh in 2021 um and we're looking at this from a perspective of downloads consumer spend and monthly active users so starting with uh with downloads this is a a list which you'll see some uh some familiar names um i've got to look back on this chart over the last two to three years and you know free fire have been at the top for the last uh for the last three years along with pubg which you know those those two games consistently uh top or in the top five um illustrating that there's still an enormous desire for the battle royale format we also see consistent representation from subway servers and candy crush um indeed the overall representation from hyper casual and casual in the download download measurement very very clear and indeed kind of among us and ludo king strong growth in 2020 coming through to 2021. the real story from this is roblox last year they did not appear here at all um and in fact if we were to look into

some of the other metrics around usage around average sessions per user average time uh roblox is outperforming by anything up to 30 of any other game in this list and that's really what's driving them to the top of that consumer spend um uh list that you can see in the middle there also tremendous representation from uh tencent so uh the titles of honor of kings pub g and game for peace um still consistent uh appearance from the likes of coinmaster um and gentian impact's um you know 100 million budget clearly paying off in terms of uh some of the consumer spend that we're seeing now when it comes to monthly active users well it feels like these are the kind of household names that you know transcend mobile gaming transcend gaming really they've been cross-platform for for quite some time um but you know um a lot more than that the likes of pokemon minecraft candy crush among us these are more than just games more than just games you can play multiple devices they're branded on

people they kind of live and live them it's um those are you know consistently what we see and um from a monthly active user perspective so um just uh taking a brief look at what that means from a a company um uh perspective again uh the names that we see on the left-hand side here in terms of downloads no surprise that kind of the hyper-casual sector is what is driving um you know these company names um applovin and voodoo i think we're exactly the same first or second uh last year really impressive performance from azure um to come in up into third and it's the first time that we've seen iron source appear in uh in this list from a download perspective when we come to to look at the uh more from a consumer spend side um consumer spend perspective um no surprise that a lot more kind of cool games uh appear there so the likes of tencent again honor of kings game for peace pub g uh is what drives them to the top of that list um and again you

know across the the whole group they're pretty consistent kind of year over year um with the exception of um uh really roblox being that that kind of big um change to that list um in 2021 so from this point last year nowhere to be seen now uh clearly a um an established established company in that uh that list on the right hand side there so just to just to wrap on the final um final few slides um again this is all really to kind of emphasize what a positive outlook and opportunity there is um for uh for mobile games moving forward and and this is really to kind of build on the the kind of the broad opportunity that exists across demographics so um something that we do is is look at this by fairly fairly large kind of um uh demographic groups of gen z millennials gen x and baby boomers but you know looking at really what are the um the preferences by uh these demographics so jen said 127

more likely to play the mafia betrayal games um the likes of koi master homescape still popular within millennials and uh within gen x and baby boomers 65 percent more likely to play tabletop games the point here is that you know gaming is ubiquitous gaming is an appeal to multiple different demographics and that only set to uh only set to grow through through 2022 so just to um just to wrap up on um on this a few predictions for uh for 2022 um we expect ticktock to add 50 more uh 50 more users around 1.5 billion uh if we go to number six the kind of spend within those social apps expected to uh to see nine billion of uh in-app store spend uh indeed entertainment apps also uh reaching 12 billion in 20 in 2022 and some favorites of temple run 2 to reach a billion downloads and subway servers to reach uh to reach 2 billion in 2022 a lot more kind of predictions and insight is available

um one shameless plug for also our game changers podcast um if you'd like to qr code that and subscribe to that podcast but um that's all from me uh hopefully that was useful and uh thank you very much for your time thank you [Music] [Music] you