While every major business sector took a critical hit in terms of revenue and volume, mobile gaming was one of the very few industries which touched record levels of revenues and downloads leading to exponential growth amid the pandemic.
As the social distancing and travel restrictions forced everyone to stay indoors, more and more individuals chose mobile gaming as one of their sources of entertainment. With the impact of COVID-19 expected to extend well into 2021, the entire sector is set to resume its impressive growth.
Data presented by Uk-based Safe Betting Sites reveals that the mobile gaming sector is executed to attain a growth of 44 percent in two years to reach $109.6bn in revenue in 2021.
One of the fastest emerging segments, mobile gaming has been on the rise over the last several years. Market and consumer data specialist Statista reported that the entire mobile gaming market touched $57.7 billion in value by the end of 2017. Years 2018 and 2019 saw the revenue from mobile gaming rise by 31 percent to reach $75.9 billion by the end of 2019.
However, the pandemic-induced lockdowns stoked accelerated growth to the sector which saw a remarkable year-over-year surge of 25 percent to reach $95.1 billion, representing 70 percent of total video games revenues last year.
The positive trend is expected to continue well into 2021 revenues expected to show year-over-year growth of 15 percent with the segment forecasted to hit over $160 billion in value by 2021.
Data from the Statista survey revealed that more than 400 million new mobile gamers came into foray amid the pandemic, taking the overall number of mobile gamers from 1.37 billion in 2019 to almost 1.8 billion in 2021. The survey estimates to have more than 2.2 billion mobile gamers worldwide by 2025.
Gaming Leadership
The largest mobile games industry in the world, China is expected to have more than 560 million users in 2021, contributing as much as $41.4 billion in revenue to the sector. The Chinese mobile gaming market was one of the fastest-growing amid the pandemic, with a reported growth of 50 percent since 2019.
The United States, the second-largest mobile games market, witnessed a growth of 34 percent amid the pandemic with a collective revenue of $20.4 billion. The US mobile gaming market is expected to grow 14 percent in two years while adding close to 156 million users in 2021.
Japan, South Korea and India follow the pack after generating $12.4 billion, $4.5 billion and $3.8 billion in revenue, respectively in 2019.
