Torulf Jernström is CEO of Finnish developer Tribeflame.
His blog is Pocket Philosopher.
You can read all his PocketGamer.biz columns here.
The largest market for games, as measured by both player numbers and revenue, is being completely ignored by the games media. Why?
Newzoo claims the mobile games market is worth $36.9 billion, while Superdata claims it’s $40.6 billion and App Annie says it’s $50.4 billion (as Jon Jordan commented this week).
One possibility for the difference in revenues is that Newzoo and Superdata are missing the ad-driven part of the market.
It’s a lot harder to estimate the ad revenues as they are are split up among a large number of ad networks that are often private companies that do not report numbers as transparently as Google and Apple do.
App Annie’s Monetisation report from 2016 claimed that in 2015 games made $24.8 billion from IAPs, and $21.1 billion from ads, for a total of $45.9 billion. Ad revenue is therefore a very significant part (46%) of mobile games revenues that might be missing from the other reports.
Regardless of what the exact numbers are, it is clear that mobile games are the largest part of the overall games business.
Newzoo claims that the whole market is worth $91 billion, while Superdata says it is $99.6 billion. They differ mostly in their estimates for the size of the console market, possibly by Superdata including hardware sales, while Newzoo only counts games.
That puts mobile games’ market share anywhere between 37% and 45%.
In terms of players, mobile games are even more dominant. The Superdata report estimates a total Monthly Active User (MAU) number of 2.6 billion players on mobile, with 755 million on PC free-to-play, 154 million on PC premium and 196 million on consoles.
Mobile, therefore, has way over twice the player numbers of all others combined.
Given this position at the top of the market for both revenue and players, it is striking how little mobile F2P games are talked about in the media.
Googling for the “Best games of 2016”, and going by the top hits I get, here’s GamesRadar (25 games), The Telegraph (35 games), The Guardian (10 games), and The Verge (11 games).
Their lists include 81 mentions of games, and contain a grand total of two mobile games: Pokemon GO (F2P) and Reigns (premium). It is slightly more common to find mention of premium mobile games. The Verge mentions two on their 10 game list for 2017.
Sadly, the premium mobile games market share fell to irrelevance back in 2012 and 2013. Currently you have to scroll down to position 232 on the US App Store Top Grossing charts to find the first game that does not use IAPs (it’s currently GTA: San Andreas).
And that's before taking into account the ad revenue that F2P games have access to and premium titles do not. Premium on mobile has for years been below 1% of the revenue generated.
The question is: why? With mobile F2P having both the players and the money, why are they ignored? Allow me to speculate a bit.
First off, premium console and PC games are very clearly skewed towards Western markets. Compare the shares of Asia versus the West for console and mobile games in SuperData’s report.
Also, I think it’s because the games journalists are not the players, and certainly not the payers, of mobile games. To simplify, the revenue generating players fall into three categories:
- The ad watchers - Heavy players of the Top Downloaded games. Skews younger.
- The casuals - Typically older female audience playing match-3 games, casino, etc. Loyal players giving out a steady revenue stream.
- The killers. Rich, competitive men with limited time and a lot of money, beating each other with heavy spending on competitive strategy games.
My guess is that the journalists writing about games do not identify with these groups of people. Game journalists are seldom middle-aged women, and obviously they are also not high paid lawyers or investment bankers.
The simple time killers that are generating a lot of the ad revenue are usually (quite rightly) dismissed as lacking in depth.
Thus, we end up with the situation we have: the largest segment of the huge games business is almost completely invisible in games news.
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Most people who play mobile games (as your description above says - which is spot on!) don't spend a lot of time reading up on gaming news. They either play what they find on their own and like, or they don't have time for all of that.
We have been trying to dig into some mobile titles and find the things that our audience would be interested in and have found it to be quite difficult. With so many titles out there no one has time to go through them all and pick out the great ones. Esp. with a site like ours where we play more RPG type games.
I see that someone already brought up other points that I would have gotten into, so I won't reiterate those too much. Things like copycats of the same game always popping up and etc.
Anyhow, great article!
I do still feel like you're missing a fundamental part of the mobile games experience by trying to make them fit the console/PC experience. The game does not have to be shallow just because the game sessions are short!
A typical Game of War early on did 10 sessions of 12 minutes each. That's 2 hours in total. Recurring every day. On average, the total time spent in a mobile game is far LONGER than that spent on PC/Console. It's just divided into lots more short sessions. And a lot of the planning and dreaming about the perfect play happens between the sessions.
I would argue that the players who have been playing Clash or Game of War for several years daily are actually feeling just as deeply about the games as a PC player feels about theirs.
To be a bit provocative: isn't this the same phenomenon that had classical music experts dismissing early rock music as unworthy of critique and comment due to it's shallow nature?
But within that timeframe Mobile games *generally* offer a different kind of entertainment than typical console / PC games - often centred around organisation, efficiency & quick player feedback. They are more like board games - clever but less about drama or characters or worlds. Console & PC has similar games but they're only a small part of a much wider offering, and as such the content can be more similar to watching a movie or reading a book in a way mobile games are not. However there's no inherent reason mobile games can't do that too - the industry simply decides not to, because everyone wants to be Supercell.
As to whether mobile or console is intrinsically 'better' (really? must we?), there's no such thing as it depends entirely on what players or developers see as important. If we're saying character-driven games with emotional & mechanical depth that inspire fans & press then console & PC is clearly superior to Mobile.
Whereas if number of players, reach and financial success is more important, the top mobile games are clearly 'better'. This is a blind alley.
The constant need to pretend all games are intrinsically the same is silly. I wouldn't even say mobile F2P games are very like paid games on the same platform, never mind PC & console. To me, to ask why all games aren't treated as the same requires a sort of wilful blindness in the face of the obvious.
Mobile F2P are likely to stay mechanics focused.
Sadly, I think stories are fundamentally hard to do in (mobile) F2P. It's simply a numbers thing. I mentioned the 2 hours per day for Game of War. With players doing that every day for 2 years, the total game time will be around 1500 hours!
That would be similar for the other top performers. My in-laws are into the King games. I asked my mother-in-law how much time she had put into Candy Crush Saga. Her first guess was 500 hours. After thinking a bit, she said that's likely not enough.
The fundamental problem is that no one can write thousands of hours of story fast enough to feed several hours to the players each day. Which means that the Explorer Bartle type is essentially never satisfied by F2P games. That's very unfortunate, but I cannot see a way around it.
"When we think of these “whales” we often imagine them as rich people with a ton of disposable income. Research has showed that “whales” are way more average than that. Basically - they can be anyone. There is not one defining characteristic or profile that allows us to specifically pre-determine who could be a whale or a specific demographic to target. We have had whales that are male, female, in the military, doctors, lawyers, mothers, students - basically all walks of life. What does that mean? Well it means we need to stay focused on building great games with great content for any and all players."
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeLu/20140110/208428/Lessons_on_Mobile_Gaming_from_a_Whale.php
Having been a games journalist writing for magazines like EGM before spending many years working in mobile F2P, I can give you an alternate reason for why mobile F2P isn't covered by games press: it's a different medium than console/PC.The difference is as stark as the distinction between syndicated television shows and films. Mobile F2P is really a hybrid of video games and video slots, effectively becoming its own medium with its own rules. It's not reasonable to use the same criteria to judge the different mediums.
Please understand, this is not a qualitative/gatekeeping argument... any given episode of "Seinfeld" is better than "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo". But it makes sense that a film critic wouldn't cover an episode of Seinfeld. To that point, it would probably strike you as strange if somebody said that they saw a great film the night before, and started describing an episode of Seinfeld. I think that a part of interactive media maturing will include defining video games and F2P games as fundamentally different mediums.
Jonathan Blow gave a wonderful talk about exactly this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc
The anecdotal evidence I do have indicates that the heavy spenders really are the wealthy. I know some: a VC, two successful Entrepreneurs. They are clearly choosing to spend huge sums in Clash Royale instead of buying yet another sports car.
So, until proven impossible, I will keep trying to build a "Robin Hood" game. One where a few rich guys finance a huge amount of free entertainment to millions of gamers who do not need to pay a cent for it.
That is even displayed in the Influencer world. It's way easier to produce very joyful and interesting content as a YouTuber (for example) out of a console game or desktop game which gives you hours of entertainment and different story lines and so much more than doing the same based on a Match-3 game. Even games like coc will very quickly come to a point where a session is not longer than 5 minutes cause you don't want to spend 20$ to get that big crystal chest.
So me as a reader - I am rather interested in the newest E3 highlights than in the current Appstore top grossing charts. :)
I do think that there are some great mobile games out there though! I would love to be able to cover more of these but they have to offer something that draws my readers in, and makes it worth my time to write it up. It can't be another match 3 game or etc. Not to take anything away from those types of games... but there are 2 million of them out there and I don't do my readers a service by showing them another one.
I also love the fact that mobile games are built or a shorter play experience at one time. Sometimes I look at what I know is going to be a 40+ hour game and I feel overwhelmed. I know I only have 20 mins to sit down and play and I'm not sure I can get through the intro and to a point to save in that time. Instead i turn to a mobile game (fallout shelter anyone???) and play that. I probably have more hours in that than I do any one console game!
Anyhow, just wanted to give my take on a few points you brought up. Also, what types of games do you make?