According to statistics, in the first half of 2021, users around the world carried more than 1 billion downloads of mobile products every week, which is 25% more than in 2019. Weekly spendings in the iOS App Store and Google Play amounted to more than $1.7 billion (40% more than in 2019). The time that Android users spend on portable entertainment every week has also grown significantly over the past two years. The growth was 35% and reached indicators of more than 5 billion hours per week.
Gametech Will Continue to Drive Growth
New developments will continue to affect the industry:
- From a development perspective, engines like Unity and Unreal will improve their products and allow more developers to create compelling products like wintermoolah.com offers.
- On the platform side, leading gaming companies such as Epic Games and Roblox will continue to combine music and movies with virtual gaming worlds, ushering in a new era of innovative experiences.
- Advertising technologies and monetization tools will be much deeper involved in player experience allowing to decide regarding additional purchases in seconds.
High Speed of In-Game Ad Monetization
In-game advertising is widely used by developers of all genres to support the monetization of in-app purchases. However, ad units such as reward videos and ad walls add value to the gameplay, and for many interested players, they are a welcome alternative to real cash payments.
Combining Gaming Experiences
One of the main factors behind the explosive growth in popularity is that the user experience of the game on consoles and mobile devices begins to merge. Today, mobile devices are capable of offering console-like graphics and experience, as well as cross-platform,
competitive, and social features. Thanks to this, the market will also benefit from increased user engagement.
Social Features Will Continue to Grow
Expect to see a variety of products that integrate social mechanisms such as:
- activity streams (where users can follow the progress of others);
- chats;
- push notifications.
The rise of the hyper-casual category, with developers adding more depth and meta-features to their solutions, could also contribute to a surge in social interaction.
Unification
Despite the COVID-19, there have been many mergers and acquisitions in this sphere, and the main theme was the merger of companies:
- Zynga has acquired two of Istanbul's leading developers: Peak Games for $1.8 billion and Rollic Games for $180 million.
- Stillfront Group acquired Storm8 for $300 million.
- Take Two acquired Playdots for $192 million.
- Miniclip acquired Israeli Ilyon Games for $100 million.
- This trend is expected to continue, and the giants will take over the mid-tier of companies.
In 2021, mobile gaming will generate more annual revenue than other industries combined. Global spending on smartphone products is expected to surpass $120 billion by the end of 2021. In this article, we analyzed the smartphone entertainment industry and its trends that set the vector for the development of the entire industry.
