Mobile game revenue for 2023 is at a staggering $107 billion according to Data.ai. Read on to see what we think about the future of mobile games according to these figures.
Mobile Games Continue Earning Staggering Revenue
A Bright Future Ahead Despite Minor Dip In Sales
According to a statistics company specializing in insights on the mobile landscape, Data.ai, mobile game revenue managed to reach a collective $107 billion back in 2023. This figure likely doesn’t even include revenue earned by these games through PC or console purchases, which are available on increasingly numerous and major titles such as Honkai: Star Rail and Reverse 1999.
Although that figure was achieved despite a dip of about 2% from the previous year’s total, it’s still incredibly impressive. To better understand the mobile landscape, Data.ai also provided a ranking of the highest-earning mobile game genres:
- RPG (such as Honkai: Star Rail): $24.5 billion
- Strategy (such as Rise of Kingdoms): $10.7 billion
- Matching (such as Candy Crush): $10.2 billion
- Casino (such as Jackpot World): $8.3 billion
As expected, RPGs blow the competition away with a figure that almost beats the combined total of the three following genres. Included in this category are all of HoYoverse’s giants such as Honkai: Star Rail, Genshin Impact, and Honkai Impact 3rd, as well as other big titles like Raid: Shadow Legends, Evony, Lineage M, etc.
The financial success of these games can be partly attributed to the very effective strategy that most of them employ to get their players to spend. These are the daily quests and skinner boxes that even some live service PC and console games have started to employ. All they have to do is to give their players an incentive to integrate the game as a part of their players’ daily routines. After which they have free reign to entice them with "deals" such as discounted currency packs.
While some players would only spend a little money at the start, such as purchasing the monthly currency packs that provide them with daily credits and other benefits (which are especially enticing when the game is littered with ads like Seven Knights Idle Adventure), the mere fact that they are spending money opens the possibility that these players would even more down the line.
The temptation is only aided for players to succumb to because most mobile games are free right from the start. Without having to invest in a game to play it, players are more accepting of the idea of spending a little money for a long-term benefit.
This relationship, of course, isn’t one-sided. Mobile game developers must continuously inject new and exciting content into their games at a relatively more frequent rate than pay-to-play games. That may be because free-to-play games are at a much higher risk of being dropped by their players because of the relative lack of investment they could put in it. Compare that to, say, players who have purchased a $70 game; they would be less inclined to let it go because of the awareness that they paid for it, so the developers have more leeway to create and release content.
Additionally, these free-to-play mobile games usually have a better reputation than most PC and console games. Despite what many self-aware people from the HoYoverse fandom would claim, the mere fact that something can be live-service and free-to-play on a device that virtually anybody could carry around at all times already makes that game possess an absurd value for money. This makes them far less likely to be crucified online even against similarly terrible PC and console games.
But again, this fragile peace hinges on the developers’ ability to maintain a steady stream of new content. Its pace must also be frequent enough to not bore its players, but not to the point where they feel congested. This is one of the reasons why Tower of Fantasy’s reputation dropped hard after a few months of service. Not only did they not take care to assuage their player base’s concerns regarding balancing, but they also released new and returning characters at such a pace that it became difficult to maintain their low-spending demographic.
Regardless, it's overall rising revenue means that it might be able to put up good fight against PC and console games in the future.
The Mobile Console PC
Another interesting ranking from Data.ai concerns mobile game revenue earned by the country. The top five are:
- China: $37.6 billion
- USA: $24 billion
- Japan: $12.78 billion
- South Korea: $6.34 billion
- German: $ 2.6 billion
The point of interest isn't China outspending the entire population of the USA and Japan in mobile games; it’s the fact that the USA and Japan got into the top five in the first place. These are the countries where the Xbox and Steam Deck, as well as the PlayStation and Nintendo Switch were born, respectively. And while mobile games aren’t a Chinese thing, there’s little arguing about how people would always refer to the two Chinese mobile game juggernauts Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact when talking about the platform’s general successes in 2023.
But we shouldn’t forget: despite being the birthplace of the world’s biggest consoles both new and old, USA and Japan are also the birthplace of some of the biggest mobile games in the industry. The often meme’d on Raid: Shadow Legends and the massively popular Fate/Grand Order are excellent examples of their big titles, as well as Diablo Immortal, Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, MementoMori, and Heaven Burns Red.
Even South Korea has some incredibly famous titles such as Goddess of Victory: NIKKE and Blue Archive.
However, there’s a recent and even more notable trend that’s being slowly adopted by a growing percentage of big mobile game releases. Perhaps it’s being done to copy one of the biggest reasons for Genshin Impact’s success, or just to allow for more accessibility (and profit).
That is, mobile games are slowly breaking out from their platforms.
Take, for example, the aforementioned Genshin Impact. To say that HoYoverse’s open-world fantasy RPG was a success is a massive understatement. Regardless of how you feel about the game, it is a fact that it is one of the most successful mobile titles to have ever been released, and, funnily enough, is still one of the biggest competitors on the market despite its relative age.
It’s even funnier to think that its biggest competitor is Honkai: Star Rail, a mobile game made by the same developer.
One of the reasons why it’s so successful is, without a doubt, the game’s availability on multiple platforms outside of the average gacha-lover’s phone. It allows players to experience the magic of Teyvat on a screen many times larger than a handheld. At the same time, it also supports controls much more familiar to gamers such as keyboard-and-mouse or gamepads.
This isn’t HoYoverse’s first foray into porting one of its titles into a platform outside of mobile. They’ve also released their previous and much-loved action RPG Honkai Impact 3rd to the PC at an earlier date; perhaps a test into how their games would perform outside of their platform of expertise. Accordingly, their latest hit release Honkai: Star Rail was also released with cross-compatibility, and their upcoming game Zenless Zone Zero seems no different.
Nowadays, many mobile titles are also being released for the PC such as 2022’s Goddess of Victory: NIKKE and CounterSide, and 2023’s Snowbreak: Containment Zone, Limbus Company, and Reverse 1999 (which I am still addicted to). Some games even got on the bandwagon late like Kuro Game’s Punishing Gray Raven and GAMFS N’s Brave Nine (which makes you think: why doesn’t Brown Dust 2 have a PC port?).
Those titles are far from the end of it. Project Mugen will also be released on PC and consoles, and Kuro Game’s Wuthering Waves will be cross-platform as well. Sequels of old but popular mobile games such as Arknights Endfield and Girls Frontline II: Exilium will also have PC ports, and very likely other new IPs such as Duet Knight Abyss and Project Stars will have them as well.
While it may be wrong to assume that Genshin Impact was the first of its kind, as many mobile titles have been released for the PC and consoles before it such as Valkyrie Connect, Onmyoji and Shadowverse, it certainly played a significant part in the recent trend for major mobile game drops to have a simultaneous PC and/or console release.
And considering the successes of these games, we’re surely going to see much more of them in the future.
Could’ve Sworn That Was a PC Game
Another ranking prepared by Data.ai is a list of countries that downloaded mobile games the most, regardless of spending. According to their data, the hierarchy goes like this:
- China: 29.32 billion
- India: 9.66 billion
- Brazil: 4.62
- USA: 4.55 billion
- Indonesia: 3.38 billion
That brings us to a certain topic: what makes a mobile game proliferate? For sure, a beautiful or badass thumbnail and a catchy title will do the trick, but that’s only good for getting people to check your Google Play Store or App Store page out. Above that, we get to the real grind - the things that truly matter.
The game’s substance itself.
Here at Game8, we judge a game for its Story, Gameplay, Visuals, Audio, and Value For Money. It’s the common set of things people scrutinize in games. Mobile games, perhaps much to the dismay of PC and/or console gamers out there, should be assessed similarly.
Back in 2016, times were much more simple. I remember when my favorite games back then were the likes of Seven Knights, Soccer Spirits, and Shadowverse (they all start with S for some reason). Though they looked nice on my phone, they were undoubtedly mobile games at first glance, even if I sync my phone with a smart TV.
Later on, things weren’t much different. The PC ports of Valkyrie Connect and Onmyoji still looked like mobile RPGs, and Shadowverse still looked like a mobile deck-builder, but with cards bigger than your hands. However, once the trend of porting mobile games to the PC became much more prolific, recent releases have been getting much better at stretching and exerting the hardware of their platforms.
Gone were the days where mobile games could be run by basically every concurrent generation of phones at the maximum framerate the model could throw up. Now, minimum specs, or chipsets, have become a thing.
A future where you could run Snowbreak: Containment Zone on your calculator seems so far away, basically.
Mobile games now demand more than a brick of glass and wires to run. Their graphical demands exploded, and now we even have dedicated gaming phones for mobile gamers to purchase. Maybe gaming phones themselves will take a leap into becoming portable gaming devices with a camera, and calling and messaging features. As to why, one could simply look at a game such as Honkai: Star Rail and judge if their decade-old Samsung S7 could run it well.
Although there will always be mobile games designed for the general masses with less powerful phones, the developers with their sights set on the skies will likely turn their eyes away in favor of putting mobile games as close as possible to PC and console titles. And that’s a great thing. That just means an entire category of gaming is making a leap into the future.
However, they should take care to make sure that their console/PC ports can coexist properly with their original mobile versions. At the very least, mobile accessibility should be given priority. That’s what would define them as a mobile game, after all.
Besides, being mistaken for a PC/console game with a mobile port isn’t as attractive as the opposite.
Sources:
Data.ai
Mobile games generated US$107 billion in 2023
