Mobile devices are setting the gaming industry trends for the coming years like never before. Mobile games are becoming incredibly popular with players, large companies and businesses alike due to their high return on investment and low development costs. As a result, it has happened that mobile devices have become the mainstream platform, partially replacing PCs and consoles. Read the full report here.

A side note: Inworld report: artificial intelligence will change NPCs

Is it worth talking about the profitability of the mobile market? For example, if we take the 2022 report we can see that revenues have fallen by 5% to $110 billion, but is that so bad considering that PC and consoles combined were around $80 billion? Mobile gaming is the future, the next branch of the industry, primarily related to the acceleration of the general pace of life and the need to be more autonomous, and the major corporations understand this and continue to invest multi-millions to develop the mobile gaming market.

When discussing 2023 and its prospects, it is safe to say that three billion players will continue to support a rapidly growing market, allowing it to generate at least half the revenue of the total across all platforms.

Multi-platform releases will set gaming industry trends for 2023

Unity’s 2021 report indicates, that 87% of players played cross-platformers, of which 43% would like to see more games in the industry. Games in this format were in high demand last year as well, and developers are likely to devote far more money and time to developing games for all gaming platforms. They have a great return on investment, while keeping an audience on all available devices (which of course have one or the other game on them) rather than just one device. For example, Genshin Impact became one of the most popular mobile games last year, earning as much as $3 billion exclusively on Android and iOS.

Gaming industry trends
Genshin Impact has become one of the most popular mobile games in 2022

On the subject: hyper-casual games are getting out of hand

We’ve already talked about how some studios are slowly shifting their focus away from hyper-casual games towards other genres. The ways to monetise these types of games are losing their relevance, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to promote them. In the coming year, hyper-casual games will be replaced by hybrid-casual ones. They will retain many of the genre’s traits but will bring a number of positive changes to keep hyper-casual and related games in the general flow of the gaming industry. Hyper-casual games are still popular, but foresight and caution will not be out of place for game developers.

Despite the high popularity of hyper-casual games, developers are increasingly moving towards hybrid-casual

As a result, in 2023 at the very least we can expect new multiplatform games or new ports of established hits, the development of the hybrid-casual game genre, as well as continued rapid growth of the mobile game market as a whole.

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