Despite the pessimistic mood of analysts, the gaming market continued to earn well. According to Newzoo, in 2021, the revenue of the global game dev reached $180.3 billion for the first time in history. More than half of the amount was brought by mobile.
Basic figures
- In just a year, the revenue of the gaming market grew by 1.4%. Despite the fact that Newzoo analysts had previously predicted a decline, it was expected that revenue would amount to $175.8 billion (1.1% less compared to 2020).
- As explained in Newzoo, in 2021 the market became less dependent on the supply of gaming hardware and AAA releases. It was assumed that, among other things, the market would not grow due to problems with them. Subscriptions and season tickets have replaced them.
- Mobile remained the most profitable segment. Its revenue reached $93.2 billion. Growth by 7.3% in annual terms.
- The console segment became the second in terms of revenue. He earned $50.4 billion. However, this is less than last year — by 6.6%.
- There was also a drop in the PC segment. It decreased by 0.8% to $36.7 billion. Among computer games, the niche of browser projects suffered the most. Earnings from them fell by 18.2% to $2.6 billion.
- As for the gaming audience, there are currently 3 billion gamers in the world — 5.3% more than in 2020. 55% of all gamers live in the Asia-Pacific region.
Trends of the year
- The popularity of cloud gaming continued to grow. In 2021, this segment earned twice as much as last year — $1.57 billion against $669 million. Analysts expect even more growth in the near future. According to the forecast, in 2024, the revenue of cloud gaming will reach $ 6.5 billion.
- Also, people began to use 5G-enabled devices more. In 2021, the share of smartphones with 5G increased by 10 percentage points (to 703.5 million devices).
- Esports events were watched much more actively than ever before. The audience of esports amounted to 465.1 million people (an increase of 6.7% in annual terms). Segment revenue rose to $1.08 billion, which is 14.5% more than in 2020.
- Interest in streams has also grown — by the end of the year, the audience of live broadcasts amounted to 747 million people. Facebook Gaming has collected 23.3 billion hours of views, YouTube — 4.5 billion hours, and Facebook Gaming — 3.5 billion hours (for Facebook, analysts did not provide data for the whole year, but only from April to the end of December).
