A new Data.ai report says that the mobile games market is expected to drop global mobile game revenues by as much as 5% in 2022 to $110 billion. In addition, hyper-casual simulation games were the most popular genre among users, accounting for 29% of all downloads (approximately 17.5 billion downloads).

data.ai report
Overall figures for finances, time spent playing games and number of downloads

The mobile games market and financial turnover according to Data.ai report

For 2022 there was a drop in financial income for mobile game developers compared to the same period in 2021. Leading the spending among players was China, with about $42.4 billion spent on mobile entertainment, and the top five were the United States ($24.02 billion), Japan ($13.1 billion), South Korea ($5.28 billion), and Germany with $2.47 billion in spending.

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Player spending figures for 2019-2022

The most profitable project in the outgoing year was the hit open-world RPG Genshin Impact, and it continues to break new ground, crossing the $3 billion mark in IAP spending in the second quarter of 2022, with revenues for the year topping $25.5 billion.

RPG was the most popular genre in 2022

Among the most profitable genres were:

  • Strategy. Total revenue was $12.1 billion
  • Match-3. Revenue for all games in this category is around $8.7 billion
  • Casino. Mobile casinos came in third place in the ranking with revenues of $8.3 billion.

A side note: Data.ai on the state of mobile gaming

The download situation on the Data.ai diagram shows colossal numbers

Although revenues have fallen, the number of total downloads for mobile games has increased by as much as 8% to almost 90 billion downloads among users.

Download figures have increased by more than 20 billion in three years

Hyper-casual games are leading the way this year, with 17.5 billion downloads, an all-time record for the genre. However, the highest percentage increase compared to the same period in 2021 was expected for match-3 games, as their number of downloads increased by 11.9% in 2022.

According to the report, users from China lead the way here as well, with 31.43 billion downloads in that country, leaving India (9.65 billion), Brazil (4.62 billion) and the US (4.57 billion) behind.

Hyper-casual genre tops the list of most downloaded games

From all of the above, we can conclude that China has been and remains the largest market for mobile games, bringing developers high revenues and huge numbers of downloads.

You can read the full report here.

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