The mobile game market proved to be a goldmine for many, however, seems like its momentum just slowed down as new data from the analysis firm Sensor Tower reported a fall of 9.6% in revenue for mobile games during the first half of this year.
Apparently, revenue numbers have been decreasing year-over-year to $11.4bn in the US only. At first glance, it may appear as if any genre was spared from losing income, nonetheless, the Arcade and Tabletop categories were the only two to see revenue increase in this time frame.
How do this two survive?
For starters, the Arcade category has been growing faster than expected with a player count growing that translates to a 14.8 % revenue growth year on year or approximately $176 million in earnings.
One example of this is Gigantic Ltd. games, specially Clawee a game where you control live claw machines directly from your smartphone or tablet and have all the prizes delivered straight to your home. This concept gave the company $16.5 million in the U.S. during the first half of the year. Followed closely by Gold & Goblins from AppQuantum Publishing and Idle Mafia from Century Games.
On the other hand, the Tabletop genre saw a rapid-growth increase of 1% year on year, which translates to $388.8m in revenue.
A lot of downloads doesn’t mean a lot of income
Sensor Tower also provides a report on download numbers and surprisingly the Action subgenre was the number one with downloads climbing by 2.3%. With Genshin Impact from miHoYo at first place with an accumulated 2.3 million downloads for the first half of the year, followed by Galaxy Attack: Space Shooter from Rocket Go Global and Galaxy Attack: Alien Shooter, also from Abigames.
Obviously, based on the graphic seen before, the Action genre suffered a 16.1% loss in revenue this first half. Showing once more that downloads don’t translate to big monetary growth.
On a sad note (at least for game developers) this year will be significantly challenging for the mobile game industry as many negative factors are pilling up, among them the rise in the cost of living, inflation, and privacy changes like IDFA deprecation.
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