Mobile playtime increases by 62% in Q1 of 2020 reported Game Analytics

The current situation that arose due to COVID-19 has changed life dramatically for almost every country. And nearly every living being including industries on earth are badly affected. Game Analytics, which helps game developers build more engaging experiences has released some critical mobile games insights. This includes the effect that COVID-19 is having on player behavior around the world. The result can be mind-boggling for many as it says Mobile playtime increases by 62%, with the in-app purchases (IAP) up by around 30% in Q1 of 2020. Earlier in April, app analytics firm Sensor Tower projected that the Consumer spending in mobile apps through App Store and Google Play will total close to $171 billion globally in 2024 and that will be double the amount spent in 2019.

At an unprecedented time like this when the world economy is looking downwards and experiencing the lowest growth. Some of the developed countries are even expecting negative growth. The gaming industry is experiencing exponential growth in terms of usage and revenue generated from users.

Since childhood, we were taught that Man is a social animal and what’s better socializing than the mighty Gaming community. We aren’t saying this but the data (Q1 2020) says so. The data from the two reputed organizations gives a clear indication that the mobile gaming industry is witnessing a short-term benefit from COVID-19 related shutdowns in most of the countries. As the majority of students, as well as the working population, is home quarantined, they need something to engage themselves throughout the day. It is also believed that working from home allows people more free time and mobile games are a good way to get entertained. The trend was quite clear when Reuters reported that the Global mobile game downloads were shot up by 39% in February. It was the time when lockdown became the talk of the town in order to safeguard the citizens.

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How did Game Analytics analyze the data?

According to Game Analytics, over 75,000 developers use their services to analyze how gamers are playing. That turns out to be around 40,000 active mobile games. Also, they used Benchmarks+. This is what they used to know how specific genres are performing overall in the mobile gaming categories. This helped to check the current state of the industry across different metrics, genres, regions, and platforms.

What does the data from Game Analytics say?

Game Analytics reported that the overall traffic went up by 46%, from 1.2 billion to 1.75 billion people playing every month over the last three months. Also, the total amount of playtime hit a peak of over 90 million hours in the last ten days of March and that was 62% higher than the first ten days of January. There can be an end to gossips but not to gaming.

People are spending more

As the playtime is increased, the data also says about the number of people that are spending on in-app purchases has also gone up. This is attributed to more people are playing games but there is another aspect and that is those who weren’t spending earlier are now doing it. While there’s a clear increase at the beginning of the year, the real difference didn’t really start until social distancing measures were introduced in Europe and North America. The data says, for most of March, the growth was between 5% and 30% a day. When you don’t have much to talk about, you play games and kill the boredom. That’s what people are following at the moment.

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Mobile gaming insights

Many people were shocked when Mordor Intelligence reported in 2019 that the gaming industry is expected to register a CAGR of 12%. It included the forecast period of 2020-2025. No one would have expected the growth in playtime would be a whopping 60%. We are also witnessing a phenomenal surge in gaming companies, making their paid games free of charge for a limited time.

According to another report by Sensor Tower for European region, App Store user spending is set to rise to $11.5 billion over the next three years. The increase is expected to be 91.4 percent from 2019’s $6 billion of revenue, at a CAGR of 24.2 percent. That’s a great jump when we compare it with the data from last 10 years. On the other hand, revenue from Google Play is expected to grow 78.8 percent from $5.2 billion in 2019 to $9.3 billion in 2022, at a CAGR of 21.4 percent.

These data suggest that there is going to be an epic battle in the playing arena of mobile gaming. Only time will tell how exactly these data are going to fit all the mobile gaming companies.

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