Recently, Unity released its 2021 Games Report, which delves into the number of games created on the engine over the past year, as well as monetization, engagement, and other key trends. The report notes that games created using Unity have grown by 93% over the past year, with casual games seeing the largest increase, up 137% year-over-year.
The bulk of casual gaming revenue comes from in-app ads, which Unity says accounts for 94.09% of the genre's total revenue. The remaining revenue comes from in-game purchases. However, in-app purchase revenue for casual games has increased by more than 162% compared to 2021.
Casual games have evolved rapidly since their inception, and many consider Flappy Bird to be the first and most successful casual game. Recently, French casual game publisher Voodoo's products have been downloaded more than 6 billion times worldwide, making it one of the world's leading mobile studios in terms of downloads.
Despite the rapid growth of casual games, Unity believes that there is a "ceiling" on the size of the user base of this type of game, and after reaching the 1 million player mark, casual games will lose market share. Unity says that for a game to maintain a larger, longer-term user base, it needs "deeper" gameplay.
In addition, multi-platform games are also on the rise, and Unity recommends keeping players in the gaming ecosystem so that they don't switch to another game when they change their gaming devices. "Original God" is a good example. Since its launch in September 2020, it has generated more than $2 billion in revenue on the App Store and Google Play in its first year. Even Netflix has tried mobile games in the hope of keeping more users in its ecosystem. The service currently has only 14 games, but another 3 are coming soon this month, and the increase rate is relatively slow.
