During the period from January to May 2022, the global mobile game market's total revenue was 34.8 billion dollars, showing a year-on-year decline for the first time since the COVID pandemic. The growth rate of mobile game downloads in Europe and the United States slowed down during the same period, while Southeast Asia continued to maintain good growth. Mobile RPG and strategy games remain top in user spending, while casual mobile games have further expanded in user scale and become the largest growth point for mobile game downloads today.
Sensor Tower's report addressed the performance of the global mobile game market in the first half of 2022, as well as several popular game categories for in-depth introduction and analysis.
Total spending by global mobile gamers in 2021 is approximately 88.4 billion dollars, another record high. In terms of mobile devices, iOS users have accounted for 59.1% of the total spending, slightly higher than Android users. Global mobile game revenue from January to May 2022 was 34.8 billion dollars, and it’s the first year-on-year decline after the epidemic.
In Q1 2022, the top 4 markets for global mobile game revenue were the US, Japan, China, and South Korea. Among them, the U.S. and Japan markets saw significant revenue declines of more than 10%; China and South Korea performed more consistently.
In terms of downloads, the growth rate of mobile game downloads gradually slowed down as the impact of the pandemic weakened globally. 2021 global mobile game market downloads were 55.6 billion, down 1.2% year-on-year. Among them, Google Play contributes 83.4% of the market share, further improving from 2020.
Although the growth rate of the European and American markets is slowing down, Southeast Asia still maintains a good growth trend in the first half of 2022. And affected by the international situation, Russia saw a significant decline in downloads in April and May.
Globally, India is still the largest market for current mobile game downloads, with a total of 2.19 billion downloads in Q1 2022, while Southeast Asia has the brightest growth performance, with Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines got year-on-year growth rates of 5%, 21%, and 10% respectively.
Source: Sensor Tower