Smartphone gaming continues to dominate the global games market

The first successful mobile phone that allowed its owners to play a game was Nokia’s legendary 6110 – “Snake” is remembered to this day as a revolutionary piece of software. It is one of the most widely played mobile games ever, with more than 350 million devices running it worldwide. Since then, mobile games have seriously transformed together with the hardware used to run them but continued to grow continuously. From a novelty, a light-minded genre, mobile games have grown to become the single most profitable branch of the massive global gaming industry. And this without the type of games you can play online at Betway Zambia.

How big is the global gaming industry? Let’s see the numbers below:

The global gaming market

Over the years, video games have become a massive industry worth a total of $152.1 billion in 2019 (estimated). The growth of the video game industry was linear in the last few years and will continue to be so in the next ones – according to global gaming intelligence specialist Newzoo, it will continue to grow by at least $12 billion each year until 2022. The gaming business is divided into several branches by the devices involved – PC, console, mobile, and web browser games. The market share of console games is relatively constant at about 30% of the total revenue of the industry. At the same time, PC, and browser gaming are losing out to mobile games that continue to grow year after year.

Mobile gaming for the win!

Smartphone and tablet games have clearly dominated the global gaming market when it comes to revenues. According to Newzoo, these two will be responsible for almost half of all the revenues generated by the gaming industry this year. Smartphone gaming is expected to generate almost $55 billion globally this year, while tablet gaming – a decreasing segment (tablets are also losing out to phablets and large-screen smartphones) – will generate an estimated $13.6 billion in 2019. Even though the growth of tablet gaming has slowed to around 5% compared to last year, the growth of smartphone gaming is accelerating: compared to 2018, it is estimated to grow by a whopping 10% this year.

Console games are expected to generate revenues of around $48 billion this year, growing by 13.4% – there are no major console launches planned, so we will not see an explosion on this front. At the same time, PC gaming has only grown by 6.6%. The browser gaming segment is the only one where the revenues are expected to decrease compared to last year – by around 15%, according to Newzoo, to around $3.5 billion.

Newzoo expects browser games all but disappear by 2022, and smartphone games to become the absolute dominant force on the global gaming market with a market share of up to 41%.