In the first 6 months of 2022, the mobile game market recorded many fluctuations, including the rise of small game companies and shows some indicators of the advantages for mobile game publishers.
Recently, SocialPeta has published “Mobile Game Market Report H1 2022” analyzing a series of major players in the industry, including Snapchat, Chartboost, Vungle, and AppROI. This report provides an overview for game companies to grasp the market and product development trends.
As reported by SocialPeta, advertising costs for mobile games are increasing rapidly. This can put pressure on independent mobile game developers, but it might increase the connection between game creators and publishers who thoroughly understand the market. The report also shows that hyper-casual games in particular and casual games, in general, are attracting more users with fun and attractive creative. Casual games have the largest number of advertisers and creatives of all genres.
1. Insight into Mobile Game Advertising:
The first 6 months of 2022 witnessed a decrease of 27.83% over the same period last year in the number of mobile game creatives.
There were 45,100 advertisers in the first six months of 2022, not much change compared to the same period last year. But the total number of mobile game creatives was 15.8 million which declined by nearly 30%.
The number of advertisers in Europe and Australasia is on a downward trend, while the rest recorded positive growth with a significant increase in advertisers in the T2 and T3 markets.
Significant increase in advertisers in the T2 & T3 market
Casual, Puzzle & Simulation are the game genres with the most advertisers. In which casual accounted for 26.03% of total advertisers, up 4.7% compared to the previous year.
RPG advertisers, which used to be ranked 3rd in the same period last year by the number of advertisers, have now dropped to 5th place after simulation and action.
The top 3 genres by number of creatives are casual, puzzle and RPG. Due to the large number of advertisers, casual creatives accounted for the largest number with 18.14%, up 1.07%. Following up is the puzzle game with 13.67%. RPG accounted for 12.14%, representing a sharpest decrease of 1.5% over the previous year.
2. Insight into Mobile Game according to the countries/regions
The second part of the report focuses on mobile game marketing activities in major markets around the world such as the US, China, Japan, Korea, Turkey, Southeast Asia and other territories.
The report shows that, in the US, hyper-casual and puzzle advertisers account for the largest share, more than 40%.
The US market recorded a significant decline in advertisers in Q1, with a peak in April.
In terms of downloads, casual has the most games in the Top 100 downloads chart, accounting for 42%, followed by simulation and puzzle.
In terms of revenue, simulation accounted for the most on the Top 100 chart with 18%, followed by RPG and action.
3. Advertising Cost
Advertising costs continue to increase with an average CPM of 19.31 USD, up 18%; average CPC was $2.57, down 3% and average CTR was 1.48%, up 7%.
The US is the region with the highest advertising costs with an average CPM of $27.54, a CPC of $4.22 and a CTR of 1.16%. Besides the US, there are 5 other countries/territories exceeding the 25 USD level, including Australia, Japan, Hong Kong (China) and South Korea.
4. Advertising trend of hyper-casual game
The combination of many factors makes the hyper-casual creatives more fun, sparking the user’s interest in playing the game. To show how easy they are to play, most of the hyper-casual creatives are geared towards gameplay. The formats are more diverse than other game genres.
Pin pulling puzzles, live action, show-how, contrast, and ending in failure are common forms used in hyper-casual game creatives which are sometimes added with other elements such as extreme weather conditions and poor leading characters.
5. Mobile Game Industry Trends
In early 2022, Activision announced that “Call of Duty: Warzone” will be developed into a brand new AAA mobile game. Apple selected Genshin Impact to show off new product performance this spring with the AAA game label. In the future, there will certainly be more giants announcing plans to make AAA mobile games, transforming the experience from PC to mobile devices.
With the normalization of COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control measures, metaverse games have begun to take shape and are one of the most promising games in the metaverse market.
According to a recent Google report, 39% of players want to experience the metaverse games. Only 16% want to play NFT mobile games.
Gen Z is a group of users who have been connected to the Internet since its inception, and therefore greatly influenced by the process of informatization and digitization. Metaverse games are expected to have greater acceptability with this group of users.
ABI Game Studio
