Trends
1. Indie developers started to release games faster. 62% of them are releasing a game in less than a year.
- Developers in small (10-49 people) and mid-size (50-299) studios started to spend fewer hours on game development. On the contrary, indie developers and large companies’ hours spent on a game continued to increase.
2. Competition in the mobile market is increasing. The number of mobile games from large studios in 2022 increased by 44%.
- The only category that started to do fewer mobile games is a studio with a headcount of 10 to 49 people.
- The number of new builds in 2022 increased by 15.7%.
- Kazakhstan experienced a surge in indie developers by 115.7%. Romania (+85.2%) and Poland (+82.1%) are among the leaders too.
- The number of mid-sized studios in Turkey increased by 260%; in Norway by 200%; in France by 196%.
3. Large studios increased the development of multi-platform games. In 2022 the number of cross-platform increased by 16%.
- 85% of studios with a headcount of more than 50 people are working on a cross-platform title.
4. Users are playing mobile games more than in 2021. The world DAU in games on average increased by 8%.
- However, people started to pay less. The number of payers declined by 2%. More people began to prefer ads to IAP.
- The majority of mobile users do prefer IAP and ad monetization. Subscriptions are much less favored.
- Unity shared the benchmark of IAP/Ad Revenue distribution by genres. Interesting that Word games in 2022 have experienced an increase of ad monetization share by 48.7%; IAP share in sports games increased by 15.14%.
- In the current market, only 0.5% of DAU (or less) are making purchases in a day.
- Games that are into the 90 percentile by revenue (games earning more than 90% of games on the market) are showing the following Retention metrics in Tier-1 countries: D1 Retention – 35.4%; D7 Retention – 14.3%; D30 Retention – 6.1%.
- Unity found a correlation between ads (mostly Rewarded Ads) and Retention. It’s higher in games with ads.
- 70% of developers are creating monetization mechanics basis on the first 30 days of development.
5. Companies started to work more on retention. In 2022 the lifecycle of mobile games increased by 33%.
- 49% of mid-size studios perceive Retention as the main trouble.
- Battle Pass is the most popular monetization mechanic of 2022. Its usage increased by 27%. Gacha became less popular overall.
