🚀 MarketWire | Gaming Trends and Defining Games of 2023: Data.ai x IDC

Hello GameMakers,

Data.ai and IDC have just published a new market report covering key gaming trends/themes and what they feel are the defining games of 2023.

In this episode, we quickly look at some of the more interesting conclusions from this report with our, maybe controversial, takes below.

The report is free and filled with lots of interesting data, so go ahead and download it for yourself below:

Some key takeaways from Data.ai and IDC:

• Consumer spending on mobile is set to reach $108B, according to Data.ai and IDC. 2023 to be another “down” year after being down for the first time in 2022.

• PC/Mac/Console game spending is slightly up 3-4% for 2023.

• Handheld spending should drop 20% to less than $3B.

• Main growth drivers for gaming from the APAC region.

• Driving (Simulation) drove the greatest growth in downloads share, and Team Battle (RPG) drove the greatest growth in consumer spend share.

• The mobile games that have defined 2023 so far (according to Data.ai and IDC):

  • Monopoly GO, Scopely

  • Honkai: Star Rail, Mihoyo

  • Royal Match, Dream Games

  • FIFA Soccer, EA

Top 10 Charts

• Tic Tac Toe is beating Roblox in downloads? Weird. They aren’t even pushing marketing that hard.

• Monopoly GO still pushing downloads super aggro! But tiered down since July 3 (iOS) and July 28 (Android).

• Fun fact: Battle of Golden Spatula is consistently Top 10 Downloads and Revenue in China but hasn’t pushed downloads since at least October of last year.

Top 10 Mobile Publishers

• The Top 10 here shows that one huge game can get you here.

Top 5 Mobile Trending

• Zupee, Babuji, and Teen Patti show that India can drive huge volumes of downloads.

Top 10 Steam Game Sellers

• Back in the day, I was the world’s greatest Soul Calibre and Armored Core player on Playstation. Seriously. Lol. Imma have to hit this new Armored Core game in the next few weeks.

• Btw, a quick update on Battlebit. Unfortunately, it looks like they weren’t able to keep expanding growth. Daily player count down to ~22K from a high of 87K:

🔦 Spotlight | Data.ai x IDC Gaming Spotlight 2023 Report

Hats off to data.ai and IDC for providing a great free report. You should download the full report yourself for more details, but I wanted to highlight three key topics from the report:

1. Gaming market growth by platform

2. Where’s the growth in mobile for downloads and consumer spend

3. Mobile games that defined 2023

#1. Gaming Market Growth By Platform

We’ve got another slight hiccup year in mobile gaming this year, with data.ai and IDC estimating $108B in consumer spend for 2023. This represents a 2% decline from 2022.

One point I may disagree with the report is the attribution of some of the decline in mobile spend in 2023 (as 1,000 other game companies have done) on ATT (App Tracking Transparency). Based on conversations with industry experts like Matej Lancaric and speaking to vendors who still offer AEO/VO types of products, digital fingerprinting seems to have largely offset IDFA deprecation.

#2. Where’s the growth in mobile for downloads and consumer spend

Based on the first half of 2023, Driving (Simulation) genre games had the most significant growth in downloads:

For revenue growth, the Team Battle (RPG) genre showed the highest growth with games like Honkai: Star Rail leading the way.

#3. Mobile games that defined 2023

The report authors considered 4 games defining the first half of 2023:

• Monopoly GO

• Honkai: Star Rail

• Royal Match

• FIFA Soccer

While I agree with Honkai: Star Rail which represents another huge hit for Mihoyo who are killing it, I believe the report authors are missing some big titles.

Data.ai has done a great job of including a lot of great data about the game:

The biggest miss here is Century Games’ White Out Survival. Part of the miss may be that their revenue is under-represented by data services. However, White Out’s integration of its early game with Century’s other hit Frozen City seems to be extremely effective.

This catfishing technique is now already being copied by other games like IGG’s Doomsday Last Survivors. There will be a full-scale change to adopt this approach in new 4X games.

The other games they mention are big, successful games, but also hugely pushed by marketing.