Topic: “Interesting Mobile Gaming Trend” The mobile gaming industry has grown astonishingly, with gamers worldwide reaching 3.2 billion in 2021, up from 1.9 billion in 2015. There are currently about 180 million gamers per month in the US alone – more than half of the US population as digital players.
With the increase in downloads and spending, it may seem that your marketing job is completed. But competition is also escalating, forcing marketers to prove they can adapt and find new ways to gain and keep user attention.
User volatility is high, so you must take a holistic approach focusing on user acquisition, in-app experience, engagement, and retention. By not focusing too much on investment, you can ensure that the users you spend time and money on acquiring stay engaged and result in higher lasting value.
Here are the mobile gaming trends shaping the market today and why they are essential to your mobile engagement strategy.
Game demographics have changed
As generations have grown up with the video games as a natural part of life, the lifespan of the average gamer continues to rise. The classic view of gaming as a pastime among enthusiastic young males has become a more diverse audience. The growth of mobile games, content quality, and increased accessibility over the past ten years means that the love of gaming is now shared by young and old alike.
IDFA poses new challenges
Privacy changes like the Apple’s ATT have shaken the mobile ecosystem and the gaming market. However, despite starting the update a year ago, mobile gaming apps still struggle to overcome IDFA challenges.
Before ATT, game publishers effectively outsourced customer acquisition to Facebook, an advertising and data factory. The Facebook found the right potential user, calculated the ROI for each new user, and tracked and also reported the conversion.
Now, however, developers must request permission to the track users’ data in apps using a standard prompt. If a user refuses, the developer can no longer follow their data in this app. The change in Apple’s use of the IDFA makes targeted advertising more difficult and directly affects user acquisition and monetization.
Netflixization of mobile games
Subscription is a popular monetization method for non-game apps, and as the publishers predicted, it’s now finding its way into the gaming industry.
Apple Arcade and Microsoft lead subscription-based games. For $15 per month, gamers can access all games owned by Microsoft and those of any third-party developer willing to participate on whatever platform they support.
This will includes not only the Xbox console and the Windows PC but also the new Xbox streaming service, which makes the console-level games available on mobile, PC, and soon enough, smart TVs or a potential Xbox streaming device.
Ultra Wide Games
Hyper-Casual games were the top performing mobile game genre in 2021. According to the App Annie, the most successful genres within this category are runner and 4X march-battle strategy games. In the third quarter alone, of the 14.3 billion mobile games downloaded, 3.6 billion were unofficial, some of the most successful examples of the monetization, engagement, and retention.
App Annie wrote on the PocketGamer.biz: “The design and development process for casual titles differs significantly from the ‘traditional’ approaches found in the PC and console markets, with concise design and development cycles, along with an incredibly narrow focus in testing. And the scale and iteration required producing a game with a low cost per install and high lifetime value.”
Mobile is the primary driver of growth
Mobile is now the primary driver of digital gaming consumption growth, increasingly becoming the world’s preferred form of gaming and essential to a robust cross-platform experience. Nevertheless, cell phones are still the most popular gaming device by a large margin.
Connectivity, hardware, and improved screen size make it easier to enjoy premium gaming experiences on the go. As a result, consumers migrated their stake from wallets to mobile as physical game consoles. Globally, users downloaded more than 1 billion mobile games per week in the first quarter of 2021, a 30% increase from the fourth quarter of 2019.
During the same time, consumers spent $1.7 billion a week on mobile games, up 40% from pre-pandemic levels. According to December 2021 data from Sensor Tower, the mobile game store’s annual revenue increased over 16% yearly to $37.3 billion on Android and nearly 10% yearly to $52.3 on iOS.
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