There’s a deluge of new data to wade through every week. So every Wednesday we’re here to break it all down into digestible chunks: data drop has just the numbers you need to know about, minus the fluff.
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Data.ai: mobile spending to hit $108bn this year
ATT and limits on play time in China mean that 2023 mobile consumer spend will be down 2% year-on-year to $108bn, says Data.ai’s latest report, put together with fellow data firm IDC.
Home console spending is forecast to be up YoY by 3% to $43bn in 2023, and PC/Mac spending is also predicted to be up YoY, rising 4% to $40bn. They also have an estimate for handheld spending, which is predicted to be down 20% to $3bn as Switch Lite interest wanes.
A regional spending breakdown shows South Korea driving mobile growth in APAC, with Brazil, Turkey and Mexico powering the ‘Rest of World’ category.
Further into the report, some more granular graphs show some genre trends – driving sims, sports, arcade racers, team battlers and idle RPGs are growing YoY if you look at downloads. On the revenue side, team battle (led by Honkai: Star Rail), match-3 (Royal Match), MOBA (Honor of Kings), luck battle (Coin Master), and party royale (Eggy Party) games are trending upwards YoY.
It also listed the 10 top grossing games worldwide for H1 2023:
- Honor of Kings (Tencent)
- Candy Crush Saga (King)
- Roblox (Roblox Corp)
- Coin Master (Moon Active)
- Genshin Impact (Hoyoverse)
- Game for Peace / PUBG Mobile (Tencent)
- Royal Match (Dream Games)
- Gardenscapes (Playrix)
- Pokémon Go (Niantic)
- Monster Strike (Xflag)
Next, some great stats on four ‘mobile games that defined H1 2023’:
Monopoly Go (Scopely)
Like Coin Master, this is described by Data.ai as a ‘luck battle’ game. It has now surpassed 45m downloads since launch in April and has generated over $232m in consumer spend globally, says Data.ai.
As above, in key markets Japan, South Korea, Canada, US, Germany and UK, it is 10% more likely to be played by female players and leans toward the 25-34 age group.
Honkai: Star Rail (Hoyoverse)
This has generated $457m in spend to date from 62m downloads, led by Japan, China and the US. It skews male in Japan, South Korea, Canada and US, but female in Germany and the UK. Player age also heavily leans toward the 18-24 bracket:
And perhaps the real secret of its success: it attracts big spenders. The below chart shows that the most expensive IAP – priced at $99 – accounted for 61% of the game’s US revenue in May 2023:
Royal Match (Dream Games)
Another star performer from recent months, Royal Match has now generated $1.7bn in lifetime consumer spend, with downloads at 149m. It skews more heavily female in top markets and is very popular among players 45 and over:
And a top grossing match games chart shows it is closing in on leader Candy Crush fast, ranking eighth top grosser in 2021, third in 2022 and second in the first half of 2023.
FIFA Soccer (EA)
The World Cups in 2018 and 2022 were huge drivers of interest for this game:
The 2022 Qatar World Cup pushed downloads up 135% YoY, and the momentum has continued – it was the eighth most downloaded game worldwide in H1 2023, and twelfth by consumer spend.
Demographic data is as you’d expect: very male and led by 18-24s.
Rounding out the report, there’s a nice breakdown of UA split by ads and search, by genre. It shows match, casino and tabletop games leading the way:
And later there’s a beefy genre split by ad format graph:
After that there’s some slightly more woolly sentiment-based data on the different ad formats. Grab the report in full here.
Survivor.io’s first birthday
An in-game event based on this game’s 1st birthday got a big App Store feature last week, so we thought it’d be interesting to take a look at the numbers according to Appmagic.
After its first full year of launch, the data firm estimates that Habby has earned close to $290m in IAP revenue from over 80m downloads. Top markets by revenue are China ($75.6m), South Korea ($65.2m), US ($58m), Japan ($35.3m) and Taiwan ($19.9m), and by downloads the leading geos are US (19m), China (13m), South Korea (8.7m), Japan (7m) and Vietnam (2.7m).
Revenue split by platform shows $199m in IAP on iOS versus $90m on Android. Apple devices are ahead on downloads too, with 45.5m installs through the App Store and 34.3m on Google Play.
My Perfect Hotel hits #1, 60m downloads
Hyper and hybridcasual firm SayGames hit number one in the US and 50 other countries last week with My Perfect Hotel.
The game was first released in August 2022, and has since passed 60m lifetime downloads, according to Appmagic. At one point it was adding 1m players per day, according to SayGames. It is a sim-builder-type game, developed by Redux Games, a studio based in Cyprus.
‘Genshin-beater’ Tower of Fantasy is one
This big, expensive Tencent/Level Infinite RPG was once pitched as a Genshin Impact competitor, but it doesn’t seem to have got quite as much traction as Hoyoverse’s behemoth. It’s currently got a load of first anniversary events running in-game; a good excuse to check the Appmagic numbers, then.
The data firm estimates that Tower of Fantasy has earned Level Infinite over $83m from IAP to date, from 7.2m downloads. Revenue is mostly from Android players, unusually, with $47.6m in earnings on Google Play versus $35.6m on iOS.
Biggest markets by revenue are Japan ($43.2m), US ($17.6m), Germany ($4.4m), France ($2.2m) and Thailand ($1.6m). By downloads, the rankings are US, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil.
