The Global Games Market 2021
The global games market will generate $175.8 billion in 2021, representing a slight -1.1% year- on-year decline. The following section highlights how we split these revenues per segment and region, as well as their growth up until 2024.
- While COVID-19 resulted in spiked engagement and spending in 2020, the pandemic’s negative second-order effects became more apparent in 2021. More specifically, remote working and disrupted supply lines continued to cause challenges, especially for console and PC.
- We forecast that mobile games will generate $90.7 billion in 2021, up +4.4% year on year and finally accounting for more than half of the global games market.
- Compared to console and PC, mobile is less impacted by the second-order effects of the pandemic. Echoing prior years, growth regions and markets such as Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Africa will drive much of mobile’s increase.
- Mobile’s revenue growth will continue to outperform both console and PC toward 2024, driven by growth regions, continued innovations in mobile monetization, and big console and PC publishers bringing their IP to mobile devices.
- Apple’s removal of IDFA is certainly disrupting the mobile marketing space, as well as mobile games monetized through advertisement (advertising revenues are not included in Newzoo’s methodology) and titles that rely on precise user targeting, but it won’t stop consumer spend.
- The ongoing growth of mobile means PC’s market share will decrease slightly in the coming years. However, content from the maturing new console generation will catalyze growth for console’s share of global games revenues toward 2024. Many titles originally slated for 2021 will launch in 2022 and beyond.