An interesting results burst came from the UK today, where games market analysis firm Newzoo has taken a look at how much time and money UK residents put into the gaming. The overall gaming market in the UK looks very interesting – but we’re more interested in where mobile fits in.
What’s the story?
Newzoo is a full market research company that focuses completely on the gaming industry. It provides market analysis and consultation in countries all over the world, but today it’s just looking at the UK.
What are the main results?
- Newzoo classifies anyone who spends money on digital games as a “gamer” – which encompasses 31 million UK residents (52% of the population)
- There is an amazing disparity between the amount of TIME spent gaming and the amount of MONEY spent on gaming in the UK – the gap between how much they spend and how long they spend playing is higher than most other countries.
You can see the full infographic here.
What about mobile?
Newzoo has broken gamers down into a pretty sensible number of categories: there’s Social, Casual, Mobile, MMO, Consol, PC/Mac (boxed) and PC/Mac (download). How does mobile perform here? In terms of money spent, it’s near the bottom. In fact, only games on social networks attract less revenue than mobile. However, it is far nearer the top of the rankings when it comes to time spent – of the 43 million man hours spent on gaming per day in the UK, 15% of them go into mobile.
What we think?
Where does this leave mobile gaming? With a lot of people playing, but very few paying. But I feel that’s a healthy position for mobile gaming to be in – for now.
The really important thing for games developers to take note of is that while mobile may not be earning as much console games every year, they are a) vastly cheaper to produce and distribute and b) still draw in a huge number of hours. It’s those hours that are important: people play mobile games. They play them a lot – and that gives developers more chances to monetise them. The revenue channels for mobile gaming haven’t really been figured out yet. It’s still a young industry. But the audience is already there, and the revenue will be as well.
