The mobile game market has grown rapidly since the 2010s and now accounts for a large proportion of the game market.
However, the market is gradually becoming saturated, and like consumer games, development costs are rising, transforming it into a red ocean.
Growth is slowing, but the market size is still large.
Mobile games were once treated with contempt for being all light games, but in recent years they have grown to become the main player in the game market. Although there are some differences depending on the calculation method, the market size share of mobile games when viewed as the entire game market is about 50%. As you know, in Japan, game companies with origins in consumer games are also releasing many titles.
The global mobile game market in 2023 is 98.6% of the previous year, at 8.7916 trillion yen. After reaching a record high in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, revenues worldwide decreased by 9% in 2022, and although revenues decreased in 2023, the decrease was smaller than the previous year, and it is expected to turn upward again from 2024 onwards.
It is often thought that mobile games are mainly played in Asia, such as Japan and China, but in fact the largest market is the United States, followed by China.
The reason why mobile games became popular from the late 2010s is not only due to factors such as the spread of smartphones and improved network environments, but also the convenience of game development companies. This is because, at least until around 2018, smartphone games could be produced with a much lower budget and in a shorter period of time than consumer games.
In the early days of mobile games, there were almost no titles as rich as today, and many had budgets of several tens of millions of yen and development periods of about one year. From among them, big hits were born one after another, and there were many cases where development costs were recouped within one month of release. Therefore, smartphone games at that time became a blue ocean for many game companies and IT companies to enter the market.
However, the mobile game market is gradually becoming saturated, and in recent years, new titles released require a budget of 300 million yen and a development period of more than two years. There are almost no more cases of IT companies hitting the big time like in the past, and the titles released by domestic companies that rank high in the sales rankings are increasingly being based on IP such as consumer games, manga, and anime.
Even so, the top-selling smartphone app still makes around 5 billion yen a month, and even the top 100 only makes around 100-200 million yen. When you consider that even if 100,000 copies of a 6,000 yen consumer game are sold, that still amounts to sales of 600 million yen (and sales expenses are far greater than those of mobile apps), you can see just how important mobile games are to today's game companies and the game market.
