After the rapid growth in 2020, many people initially thought that the mobile game market in 2021 would return to the normal level before the epidemic, but from a global perspective, both user downloads and revenue have maintained a relatively high level. Although the number of downloads in individual categories and markets has declined year-on-year, the increase is still significant compared to 2019.
Not long ago, AppAnnie senior analyst Tato Mikadze shared some of the company's trend insights based on the first three quarters of 2021 at an industry event held by PocketGamer, and analyzed the growth drivers of different categories based on user engagement, next-day retention, and monetization, hoping to help peers when formulating game strategies.
Here's the full content of GameLook's Tato Mikadze speech:
This Mikadze:
Today we will share some of the trends that AppAnnie observed for the first three quarters of 2021 (Company Introduction, Mobile Market Forecasting Service Provider, No Registered Investment Advice Business, No Legal, Financial, Investment or Business Advice).
I'm Tato, Senior Game Analyst at AppAnnie, have been with AppAnnie for over 5 years, our company is over a decade old, and I have partnerships with different types of game companies around the world.
First, the mobile game market trend
1. The New Normal:
At first, everyone thought it was the COVID pandemic that led to social distancing and the growth of the early 2021s, but we saw that user engagement, downloads, revenue, and time users spent on mobile games all stayed the same, and we found that the global average weekly mobile game downloads exceeded 1 billion times, the average spending amount exceeded $1.7 billion, and the user investment time exceeded 5 billion hours.
While we are seeing a decline in user time investment, the growth of user spending continues. Further, if we look at Q3 weekly user spending over the past 3 years, we see a 35% increase in Q3 2021, which further confirms the unabated interest in mobile games.
2. 2021Q3 global top game
If we look at the world's top games, we will find that they have a lot of categories. For example, on the download list, "Talking Angela 2" was a very successful new game of the season, followed by a lot of ultra-casual games, but there are also old games such as "Subway Parkour", "PUBG MOBILE", "Candy Legend" and "Roblox".
In terms of user consumption, "Roblox" is performing very well in 2021, the ranking of "Original God" is also very high, the ranking of "Pokemon Go" has shown a relatively large increase, and "Gold Master" and so on.
In terms of monthly active users, the head is a relatively common face, such as "PUBG MOBILE", "Roblox" and "Candy Legend".
If we look at the best performing breakout list in the chain, The Talking Angela 2 has performed very well, and then the download growth of many ultra-casual games has also increased a lot, especially many games with 3D names, many of which are parkour games and bow and arrow shooting gameplay.
In terms of consumption growth, the top of the list looks more interesting, "Odin Valhalla Rising" is a mobile game released only in the Korean market, and its revenue growth is very strong month-on-month. This was followed by a number of IP games, Harry Potter: The Magic Awakening, which performed very well, and then Royal Match, which was popular with users in many markets. There are still a lot of ultra-casual games on the monthly active user list.
On the EmEA global revenue list of publishers, we see that Playrix, Supercell, Playtika, Moon Active, Stillfront and other companies are doing very well, and many of the games that break through the list are from these publishers, and many of their companies are from the Nordic countries and Russia.
3. Head market
The head market is very interesting, we saw Russia become the champion in terms of Q3 download growth, up 3% month-on-month, second place Turkey slipped a little, France, the United Kingdom, Germany are all European markets that have been performing well.
But more noteworthy is user consumption, as you can see in the list on the right, Germany, the United Kingdom, France are the markets with relatively high contribution to user revenue, while Russia appeared in the fourth place, an increase of 14% month-on-month. This means that Russia is not only number one in terms of downloads, but also growing in terms of revenue size, and may soon become the most important mobile game market for you to buy and monetize in Europe.
Followed by the common Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey and other countries, but the mobile game revenue in these markets has declined, but this degree of decline is normal, because the summer is often a relatively high time for users to spend, with the arrival of the Q4 holiday season, the income of these markets will rise.
Second, category trends
According to our classification, over the past three quarters, these categories have performed well in terms of downloads and active users, and hyper-casual games are still far ahead in this regard. A subsequent high growth in active users was the analog category, which grew higher between Q2 and Q3, with significant growth in action games, followed by elimination games.
In terms of user monetization, we use the comparison between in-app purchase revenue and active users, and the performance of ultra-casual games here is very poor, because 99% of their revenue comes from advertising monetization, which is not reflected in the statistics. However, we can clearly see that the revenue performance of categories such as simulation and action, which have better downloads and user performance, is also good.
However, the best arPU performance is the RPG category, which can drive revenue growth on the basis of active users, and SLG games are also very good. Perhaps board games are the most interesting, and although the user base of these games is not large enough, they still have excellent performance in terms of user monetization.
Finally, looking at the specific segments and performance in the European market, SLG ranked first in terms of revenue performance, and there was a 14% year-on-year increase. Match-3 fusion, team combat (RPG), traditional match-3, and Slots are among the top five categories.
There are no surprises in the download list, ultra-casual games show absolute dominance, the top five categories account for four, children's games also entered the top five, followed by driving, sports simulation, pets and other simulation categories.
If we take a closer look at the user base of these categories, we can see that some categories are obviously driven by men, and some are mainly dominated by women.
Among the male-dominated categories, more than half of the male users in strategy, sports, racing, shooting, RPG and action games are accounted for, and the mainstream users are young people aged 16-24; the higher proportion of female categories include elimination, puzzle solving, board games, simulation, chess and cards, and ultra-casual, and these users are widely distributed in age, including Z-generation, millennials, and baby boomer users.
Third, upgrade your game strategy
Next, we look at the different ways in which you can optimize your game strategy, mainly through monetization, engagement, and game duration to better understand how specific types of games are growing.
1. Participation promotion
The case we want to use in this regard is poker, and everyone knows that the first two poker games in Europe and the United States are Zynga Poker and Playtika's WSOP.
But when we look at the average number of games and length of time per user, Governor of Poker 3 is actually the best performer, and we may need to understand what's really going on behind it.
In terms of game features, Governor of Poker 3 uses some less common social features, such as guilds, tribes, co-op missions, etc., which are standard in strategy games, but are relatively rare in poker games.
2. Monetization promotion
Next we look at RPDs (revenue per download), and we compare the two SLG products of Sultan's Game and Kings Throne: Game of Lust. As you can see, Sultan's Game is almost twice as much as Kings Throne in terms of RPDs, and the core gameplay of the two games is very similar.
So, what exactly is the difference between them that makes the RPD so different?
Through the monetization function, we found that "Sultan's Game" added a variety of game currencies, and used incentive videos as an additional monetization revenue channel, and also added decorative props, etc. Here we can clearly see that even the same type of game has adopted a completely different monetization strategy, which also explains why the income performance gap between the two is so large.
3. Retained the next day
Finally, we compared next-day retention, which mainly measures how to get users back into the game more often, which is important for long-term success.
Here we compared three Battle Royale games, especially on Android, and Free Fire's secondary performance was better. So, what is the biggest impact on secondary retention? It's actually the first user experience, which is what their first 10-20 minutes of experience after the user downloads and enters the game.
Careful comparison, we found that the three games have a very big difference in the starting experience, such as "Free Fire", the user entered the game four minutes after the end of the novice tutorial, they did not push any customization, monetization function at this stage, just quickly gave a novice teaching, and then quickly let you enter the game experience.
In PUBG MOBILE and CODM, the experience is longer, and each of them tries to push some customization and monetization features during the beginner's teaching, which may be one of the reasons why Free Fire's secondary performance is better, because the user experiences the game faster.
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