In 2021, the scale of the domestic game overseas market reached 18 billion US dollars, equivalent to about 114.5 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 16.59% far beyond the market. Superimposed on the landing of the strictest anti-addiction new regulations last year, the release of the version number has been suspended for more than half a year so far, and the importance of overseas markets is unprecedented.
However, as they go to sea and enter the deep water area, the phenomenon of Chinese game manufacturers being biased has become more and more significant. The most typical is the relatively medium-to-heavy game, China's obvious lack of world-class casual game developers, to hand over a large number of overseas market opportunities.
Sensor Tower's "2021 Annual Inventory of Chinese Mobile Games Going Overseas" shows that the United States is the largest market for Chinese mobile games to go global, bringing $3.6 billion in revenue to domestic games in 2021, an increase of 53% year-on-year. However, looking at the top of the US best-seller list on February 10, it is not difficult to find that more than half of the top 10 products in the United States have casual games, and none of them are Chinese games.
How big are casual games overseas? Why do Chinese manufacturers who go to sea and enter the deep water area ignore the leisure sector? And how will it change the status quo? This series of problems may require Chinese game manufacturers to really pay attention to it.
The global casual game market exceeds 70 billion, leading the market in growth
Foreign media DoF has published an article systematically expounding on the huge overseas casual game market. Unlike our common division, in addition to classifying products such as "Dream Home" and "Candy Crush Saga" as casual games, DoF and Sensor Tower classify Pokemon GO and even "Roblox" as casual games, while products such as "Kingdom Era" and "Original Gods" are classified as medium and heavy games.
According to the european and American game industry category division ideas, excluding the China-Japan-South Korea market, the global casual game market size in 2021 is 11.7 billion US dollars, about 74.4 billion yuan, accounting for 35% of overseas mobile game in-app purchase revenue, second only to 45% of medium and heavy games.
In terms of ultra-casual mobile games, another emerging track of casual games, because it mainly relies on advertising to monetize, the global in-app purchase revenue of ultra-casual mobile games in 2021 will be only 230 million US dollars, which is less than a fraction of the revenue of in-app casual games.
Unlike moderate games, casino games, and sports games, which are affected by the NEW POLICY of IDFA, the number of downloads has often shrunk by 10% and 20%, and the total download volume of casual games in 2021 has only decreased by 1.6%, and considering the huge base of 33 billion downloads of casual games in 2021, the scale of global casual mobile game users cannot be underestimated.
More importantly, due to the variety of categories covered by casual games, the actual part of the casual game category has shown great growth potential. For example, the revenue of interactive drama games that European and American mobile game companies are good at fell by 19%, but the revenue of "other puzzle categories" increased by 90% in 2021, nearly doubling.
Appstore has stocked games and added games in the past decade
From the perspective of new product supply, only 46,000 new games will be listed on the Appstore in 2021, the lowest in the past 10 years, and the intensity of competition in the mobile game market is declining, while for new games, from release to generating large-scale revenue in 2021, it only takes 6 months on average to enter the Top 100 of the European and American best-seller lists, which is 2 months less than 2 months compared with 2020.
It should be noted that many sub-categories in the field of casual games are controlled by a single manufacturer or several products. Take Playrix, an Irish mobile game company founded by Russians, for example, accounts for 60% of the revenue of the puzzle and decoration sub-category (match 3 + simulation operation). In other words, with "Dream Home", "Dream Garden" and "Dream Aquarium" alone, Playrix's revenue in 2021 will exceed 1.476 billion US dollars, equivalent to about 9.4 billion yuan, which is still excluding the three major global markets of China, Japan and South Korea.
Distribution of leisure game revenue categories in overseas markets
Overseas TOP2000 leisure mobile game category distribution
Successful developer teams are scarce, but they are not watertight
Interestingly, although it is not as serious as medium and heavy games, casual games also have a Matthew effect in which popularity and income are concentrated in the head, but this Matthew effect is not the overall situation, but often manifests itself within the category. For example, Playrix's dominance of puzzle solving and construction subdivisions, King's status in the traditional match-3 play category, etc.
It is a little regrettable that although Chinese game manufacturers have attacked the overseas market and even gradually occupied individual categories, such as "Original God" in the second dimension, "PUBG Mobile" in shooting, "State of Survial" and "Awakening of All Nations" in SLG, etc., in the field of casual games, China still lacks world-class casual game developers.
In GameLook's impression, there are only a few Chinese manufacturers that can penetrate the casual game market. The music element "Happy And Happy" got 100 million MAU, but the main users are concentrated in China; Dreamworld has released a series of popular casual games such as "Fruit Ninja" and "Dream Home", but it is an agency business and users are also in China.
At present, there are not many people who consciously actively lay out the overseas casual game market and achieve results, but fortunately, there are already potential stocks emerging. For example, "Project Makeover" developer Magic Tavern, "Bow and Arrow Legend" publisher Habby, "fishing" veteran Poker City, ultra-leisure market Lanfei, etc., while the giant NetEase has cooperated with Mattel "UNO", tencent has acquired Minutelis and invested in Voodoo.
Among them, "Legend of the Bow and Arrow" set a record of $35 million in 3 months in 2019, and was the winner of the Google Play Annual Best Innovative Game Award and the pioneer of the global hybrid monetization business model.
At the 2021 China Game Industry Annual Conference, CEO Xu Renbin announced that 70% of Pock City's 500 million registered users and 40 million DAUs came from overseas.
By July 2021, Project Makeover also has 100 million registered users and 4 million DAUs, and has topped the free list in 166 countries and regions, with a peak revenue of more than 200 million yuan.
It is not difficult to see that although there are few world-class casual game developers in China, once Chinese game manufacturers have the determination to enter, the success rate in the leisure field is not low.
Overseas emerging markets are in a period of outbreak, and Chinese manufacturers should seize the opportunity
Unlike areas such as AAA, which do have an absolute gap, in the field of casual games, the gap between Chinese game manufacturers and overseas game manufacturers is more conceptual than strength. Due to the domestic environmental impact, most Chinese gamers subconsciously only regard medium and heavy games as "categories with real commercial value" and pay insufficient attention to casual games.
GameLook believes that this is the domestic market in the past lack of host, PC game environment related, in the heavy game can not find the carrier that should be carried, instead of targeting fragmented mobile platforms, squeezing the space of casual mobile games, and then leading to developers paying less attention to casual games. This is the core factor that domestic medium and heavy mobile games have won the world and swept the world in the field of medium and heavy categories, but it has also caused a general gap in the field of casual games.
Compared with the core players in Europe and the United States, the core players in Europe and the United States still stay in the host and PC platforms, and the cognition of mobile games is more casual, and there are more women and older users in mobile games, and the scale of the casual game market is much larger than that of the domestic market. Especially with the development of emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, the steady growth rate and long-term commercial value of casual games are actually higher than those of highly competitive medium and heavy games.
Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, also pointed out at the beginning of this year that the new overseas market is experiencing an explosive period in the Chinese mobile game market in 2014. Therefore, GameLook believes that we should change our concept, abandon the idea of only medium and heavy games, and explore the value of casual games more.
Specific measures First, Chinese game manufacturers should increase the research and insight of the category, in fact, in recent years, the global casual game explosion has no subversive innovation, more is the miracle created by the integration of gameplay and business model, such as the "Dream Garden" and "Dream Home" that achieve "match three + simulation operation", the newly rising Tripeaks card + plot "Solitaire Tripeaks" in the past 2 years and so on.
According to Sensor Tower, Playtika's Tripeaks card game Solitaire Grand Harvest will earn $53 million in 2021, up 56% year-on-year. AppLovin's Tripeaks card game Solitaire Cruise Tripeaks also grossed $34 million last year, up 504 percent year-over-year. It can be seen that Tripeaks card play has become an emerging popular leisure track overseas.
Second, set up a research and development team that adapts to the global market, attract overseas talents, actively integrate into the local user operation environment, consider the current situation of a large base of female users and elderly users, and tilt resources more towards plot, story and level design, rather than the art that has long formed path dependence. For example, Magic Tavern's match-3 game "Marvelous Manor" released in 2017 currently has more than 5,000 levels, and in order to solve the problem of plot localization, it has hired senior talents from Europe and the United States.
Third, powerful Chinese game companies should conform to the trend of the Matthew effect as soon as possible and try to launch fist products in multiple segments in order to occupy the potential outlet track. This also means that The big money game and big data ability of Chinese games can still play a residual heat in the overseas casual game market.
GameLook believes that the backwardness of Chinese manufacturers in the overseas casual game track is only the backwardness of concept rather than strength, as long as the concept is changed, the concept is really paid attention to and the equal investment in medium and heavy games can sail into a larger blue ocean.