Consumer Spending on Mobile Gaming

Consumer mobile gaming spend for 2019 was $86.2B, 72% of the total $120B mobile consumer spend. This is across the global mobile app store (including iOS, Google Play, and Third-Party Android in China).

On gaming specifically, the mobile consumer spend has grown 2.1X since 2016 and is 25% higher than all other gaming combined (PC + Console).

We will likely see mobile gaming surpass $100B by the end of 2020.  

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Breakdown by Game Genre: Time & Spending

People are spending an average of 3 hours and 40 minutes a day on mobile (gaming and non-gaming apps), this is up 35% from 2017.  

In mobile gaming, “Core Games” (i.e. strategy, RPG, FPS) typically drive deeper engagement and longer gaming sessions while “Casual Games” (i.e. Words with Friends, puzzles) usually have the opposite characteristics. Mobile gamers spent 44% of their time on Casual games and 55% on Core games.

Furthermore, even though Core games only composed 18% of the total downloads, the category took 76% of total spend (see below). In short, the more complicated the game is, the more consumers will spend (makes sense).

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Ad Dollars: Increasingly Towards Gaming

In 2019, the MoPub exchange saw advertisers spend $0.74 of every mobile advertising dollar on gaming apps. This is up 19% year over year from $0.62 in 2018. We are not only seeing a noticeable increase in the focus on gamers but also a shift in the types of advertisements being targeted at gamers (i.e. brand awareness vs just performance driven).

I found the below in App Annie's report insightful:

“One major factor that makes gaming inventory effective for brands is that it offers engaging formats like full screen video. On MoPub’s exchange, the average rewarded video completion rate in games was 93% in November 2019. MoPub has seen brand spend increase on video by approximately 180% year over year in November 2019.”

In short, gamers watch the videos that advertisers are placing in front of them and advertisers are responding by increasing their spend by 180% y/y. This is likely to continue.