Mobile Game Spending

data.ai predicts Mobile Game Spending to grow in 2024, reversing a two-year decline!

The new report… uhh prediction, says they attribute the rebound to increase in spend in tier 1 markets like the US, Japan and Korea. The biggest genres are predicted to be RPG, Match, Party and Casino. Growth is to go from $107B in 2023 to $111B in 2024.

This is great news for a segment of the games business that saw explosive growth up through the COVID years and has been hit hard lately with the deprecation of IDFA, global inflation and China’s regulations. I think this will be a turnaround year for mobile as smart mobile game UA teams start to figure out how to optimize UA spends without per user attribution or fingerprinting. 

Also, I think in addition to the tier one market spend rebound predicted in this report we should also pay close attention to India and China. @Niko Partners reported a few months back that India has more than 450M gamers (90% on mobile) and has a yoy growth rate of 20%. Even if their APRU is low by comparison the sheer volume of users will have a significant impact on mobile revenue. Also, China is stinging right now from the regulation announcement they recently made on F2P games. Tencent, Netease and other Chinese game companies lost over $80B in value over night! They recently removed press and publications regulator head Feng Shixn over this announcement and I sense that they will soften their stance on these regulations. 

In addition, I think with the EU regulation coming in 2024 we will see the introduction of new 3rd party app stores that will have a net positive impact on spending.  

Lets go 2024 Mobile Games!