State of Mobile Gaming 2023 - Chris Uglietta, Senior Marketing Manager Gaming, data.ai

foreign [Music] [Applause] to get us started with this track I'd like to invite Chris uclaira from data AI up to the stage he's going to be giving us a state of the mobile gaming market trends and the insights you need to know in gaming for a strong start in 2023 thank you thank you foreign [Music]

[Music] [Music] this way [Music] always appreciate the hype music it's like they're teeing up the deck here but yeah um please have your cameras ready you can take pictures of any slides of course and afterwards if you come by the booth they can hook you up even with a link to the deck we will not be doing any kind of QA q a and here afterwards I encourage everyone to come to our booth just outside the door to ask any questions and have a deeper

discussion I'm glad to be here my name is Chris ukuleta I'm with data AI came in from Texas always nice to visit London clicker not working there we go that's me just a disclaimer this is no legal advice no investment advice um it's just me and you may have previously known us as abbani now we are data AI same excellent people I'm glad to be here with our UK based team today but now our name data AI reflects the underlying technology around how we gather data and make sure that it's Tip Top ready for your consumption I never got to meet Annie but Annie and nowaday I work with a lot of great companies this is just a handful of some of the top brands publisher Studios that trust us and we hope you can too

so the agenda I'm going to kind of start wide with the state of the market uh Mobile in general then into gaming then into certain genres and even games and then and then we'll talk about how we can use our data and use some of these learnings to be optimistic I know there's been another Chris who was apparently really bummer of a you know info and and I'll do my best you know I think a lot of the numbers we'll see today in any other industry that's not so accustomed to hyper growth we'd all be pretty excited about but in the context of the world today I think these numbers um are palatable and I think there's something to be excited about in terms of how to manage things forward so let's get going let's get stuck in 11 download increase that's good um two percent uh less spend of course we don't like that folks are spending more time on their phones up to five hours a day globally this is for all apps not just gaming up 14 in ad spend that's a big number

and I think that's a big area later in the presentation we'll talk about why I'm optimistic and then total hours spent overall up nine percent year over year so folks are on their phones more than ever downloading more you know there was a big bump we can see here and hours on the far right during peak covid times and then you know a bit of a recession from that and now we're back we're growing still downloads are are up spend is down and hours are up quite a bit as well so that's kind of the Top Line in global global consent consumption in mobile games and we'll dive in a little deep into each of them then we'll dive into some genres from here so you know tie span is up it's over five hours globally that's up nine percent since 2020 peak covid time so we're past that the chart on the right is hard to read and that's on purpose because I want you to come to the the booth later and I want you to download

the data AI Global state of mobile report which there'll be a QR code later in this presentation you can scan to get it but the point here is that not all GEOS are the same you're going to want to dive in and see what what changes are relevant to you and your business and where should you experiment you can only do that with a platform like data AI um so spending is dropped this is probably the worst number of all um you know but downloads are up they're up to 90 billion so you can see on the top uh the this the spend coming down and and growth going up the question is how can we get folks to open their wallets again and continue doing so in this environment because other apps or apps not games are continuing to get that money so if you take a look the bars are disposable income and the thin line on the top you have and then the US the top you have spent on gaming the

bottom you have a spin on apps so consumers are continuing to spend on apps and that's might be because they look at what they buy and their subscriptions on apps more as bills like their Netflix and so forth so how do we get consumers to look at their gaming which is entertainment which is the same as your TV type consumption look at that in the same bucket of that's a monthly expense that's part of my pleasure that's part of what I do it's my quality of life and taking a look here we see that the biggest games in terms of Revenue have had the biggest hit in terms of contraction in customer spend down the bottom and as you go up to the top the smaller games have had an easier time and you know I think this is a hint that it's not just the economic recession going on this is also idfa in that the bigger games have more scale and they have to be able to Target more efficiently and

they just can't do that as well as they did before idfa deprecation so how do we work around that um in general you know launching and scaling mid-core games it's become more challenging we know that and that's that's again because of the targeting and also because wallet shrinkage now this one hurts me a lot I'm a huge racing fan and also you were used to work at Zenga and did visit with the CSR Folks at natural motion here in London it kills me to see that they're down 33 and the racing genres down 28 um on Revenue this is all while downloads are up so again folks are wanting to play the games but they're really not opening up their wallet so how what can we learn from I think we'll see if we can learn a little bit from hyper casual uh and fall guys around around how to take care of you know this opportunity but bummer to see this I love racing same story of the shooter genre down 24

percent while they're having increased downloads so pubg and free fire down 37 percent that hurts Call of Duty you know not the best launch but still down 24 of Revenue year over year that's hundreds of millions of dollars it's not small stuff and finally the action genre down 18 percent while downloads are up 11. so again users players they want to play these games they're just not able to justify that spend or perhaps these titles aren't able to Target the right users I need to change their strategies um to to get you know to meet their targets and this was really highlighted by Brawlers and fighting brawl Stars felt near losing nearly half of their revenue and fighting games mostly in the western markets like Mortal Kombat are down 51 so pretty scary on that regard so some more good news we're going to go

on the upswing in that that proverbial sandwich that you get um the mobile ad span is up uh it's it's you know kind of new Peaks so you know Mobile in general is the space where advertisers see the opportunity to reach users to reach the eyeballs in the most targeted fashion and the fashion that returns to them so Brands want to spend here how do we leverage that you know how do we get these ads in front of the right folks in our titles of course growth is not what it was but that's to be expected all things considered as CPI or consumer spending in general across all verticals is down so this is a bit of an optimistic area you know with fall guys had a heck of a year and in general you'll see that um hyper casual downloads are are a bit you know recessed but this spend is is

just growing growing growing so that this hybrid model of showing ads while driving users to make in-app purchases is really working for them and I'm curious to see how we might see this grow in other genres as hyper casual is now reaching a very mature State and some of these games are much deeper in multiplayer and a little little stickier in the longer term than historically they've been so some opportunities and these are opportunities that you really need a tool like data AI to to dive in to capture and I'm going to jump into each of these on separate slides and these were thankfully uh from a podcast I did with a webinar with aircrest of deconstructor fund who we do a lot of work with and they enjoy using our product first of all get creative so it's literally on your creative so creative is King you've heard that term it's so true you know invest in your teams there and make sure that they're

doing all of the the newest things so you know focusing on player traits uh testing and diversifying your mix we'll jump into that leveraging IPS not just slapping it out there but really making sure doing the research through the platform to make sure that that's a match and then testing it and then looking beyond the US and tier one English speaking GEOS so getting creative you know really testing all iterations of an ad testing it through each of your channels I'm really trying to increase your IPM installs per milli um and then uh make sure that you're focusing on the player motivations rather than just the demo demographic so in Social Casino uh it's not just that you know most players are within a certain age it's it's that they're motivated by the sense of calm or the sense of winning and and so forth and really showing that in your creative and experimenting and making sure that that

is resonating uh two so leverage IP so yes known IPS can help increase your installs per Milli but you can't just slap uh you know a cooking theme on top of a shooter game and you know Gordon Ramsay shooter game expect that to work you need to make sure that it all works together and that's going to start with your data it's going to start by looking at comparable games or comparable IPS and seeing where they've found success and then ideally working with the licenser to test this before you purchase or you sign that dotted line and I think a lot of times in the past that's hard to do you know you don't want to kind of put anything out there until it's real and you know everyone has signed off on it but be creative and see how you can do that I think for both parties to know that it's going to be a win before you go forward strike the right deal as well for both parties Big Win there and then finally look beyond the U.S so

this is a screenshot from our game IQ tool where you can look through each genre and then each country by spend downloads any sort of metric you'd like but you know it's not it's not all just going to be us UK you know straightforward GEOS anymore we need to get creative to match your title or the features even within your title or the mechanisms for spend to the geography so now grab your phone this is if you want to dive deeper the easiest thing to do is download our latest report it's been out for about three weeks a lot of deep data on the whole mobile market in about a month from now we'll release a double click into the games market and you'll be made aware of that by joining the mailing list let me go back everyone get that I see a lot of phones out I'm psyched about that um we have an app it's a free app to try

you also can use do a free subscription a free trial on the Dai platform just to even check that some of the things I've told you are actionable through the platform I recommend that and also highly recommend my podcast game changers uh powered by data AI have a lot of great guests on there we'd love to meet with some of you if you have an interesting technology a strategy or something you think the world should know about I'd love to talk to you on the podcast again there won't be any questions or you know q a right now I'm going to head to the booth we'll have our team there I look forward to having a nice conversation with everyone thank you for listening to me thank you [Music]

[Applause]