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Mobile gaming market falls nearly 10% in the first half of 2022

The majority of mobile game genres saw a decline in sending and downloads in the first half of 2022, with the total mobile gaming market falling 9.6% year-over-year.

According to new Sensor Tower Game Intelligence data, the mobile gaming market dropped to $11.4 billion in the first half of 2022. Arcade and Tabletop games were the only categories to see revenue increase during the period.

Arcade game revenue increased 14.8% year-over-year to around $176 million. Other genres — from hypercasual to RPG — declined. Racing games saw the greatest drop with a 28.8% decline in revenue year-over-year, and geolocation augmented reality games dropped 26% in the same period.

In addition to the drop in revenue, mobile game downloads also fell 2.5% year-over-year to 2.4 billion.

Revenue for just the second quarter of 2022 decreased by 11.4% to $5.6 billion, although downloads remained relatively flat at 1.2 billion.

Credit: Sensor Tower Credit: Sensor Tower

Sensor Tower attributes the overall drop in the mobile gaming market to a variety of headwinds and challenges, including inflation, the end of Covid-19 lockdowns, and privacy changes like the deprecation of the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) tag.

"This doesn't mean publishers can't be successful and launch popular new titles, but an industry-wide rebound in the latter half of the year will likely depend on an improvement in macroeconomic factors, and whether publishers are able to adapt to privacy challenges," Sensor Tower wrote.



6 Comments

crowley 15 Years · 10431 comments

Is Arcade a genre?  What even is it?

And "Hypercasual" :smiley: 

applguy 13 Years · 235 comments

Pretty sure the author means spending and downloads not “sending and downloads”. 

How does privacy changes negatively effect revenue? I can understand they may not know who is buying but revenue is revenue. 

foregoneconclusion 12 Years · 2857 comments

crowley said:
Is Arcade a genre?  What even is it?

And "Hypercasual" :smiley: 

I would typically think of the arcade genre as games that are oriented around high scores. 

kestral 23 Years · 306 comments

crowley said:
Is Arcade a genre?  What even is it?

And "Hypercasual" :smiley: 

I'm thinking Pacman and shit.

Marvin 18 Years · 15355 comments

kestral said:
crowley said:
Is Arcade a genre?  What even is it?

And "Hypercasual" :smiley: 
I'm thinking Pacman and shit.

They give examples on the site (Clawee, Gold & Goblins, Idle Mafia) and the following PDF shows more category details:

https://sensortower.com/blog/u-s-mobile-game-genres-analysis-h1-2022
https://go.sensortower.com/rs/351-RWH-315/images/st-state-of-mobile-game-monetization-2022.pdf
https://sensortower.com/blog/top-hyper-casual-games-worldwide-january-2020

They assigned their own categories to games rather than use the app store categories. One of the subgenres of Arcade is Idler, which is described as games that require minimal player input:

https://www.gamedesigning.org/gaming/idle-games/

The numbers in the graphs are a bit misleading as they make it look like those top categories are outperforming the others but they make lower revenue, they just grew more.



Top Grossing games are the usual ones shown on the right on the following page:

https://app.sensortower.com/ios/rankings/top/iphone/us/games?date=2022-08-06

Candy Crush, Roblox, Call of Duty Mobile, Clash of Clans, PUBG, Pokemon Go, Genshin Impact, Clash Royale, Words with Friends, Zynga Poker, Minecraft.

https://sensortower.com/blog/top-mobile-games-by-worldwide-revenue-may-2022
https://sensortower.com/blog/billion-dollar-mobile-games-2021