Woe to calling them games: this is how much Tencent, Apple and Google earn with mobile games
The three software houses alone cover more than 60% of the shares of the mobile games market and collect billions, even simply from the sales of titles produced by other teams. Zero expenses, record revenues, that's why video games on smartphones are a bargain
For years, the gaming world was shared by three players: first Sega, Nintendo and Sony, then Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. It was essentially played in the living room, with consoles that had led to the closure of the old arcades but were unable to expand the audience of users, in a continuous stalemate. Then more and more powerful mobile phones arrived and with mobile games everything changed. Suddenly even those who had never held a controller in their hands downloaded Candy Crush or Angry Birds to occupy the subway journey or the time to spend in the dentist's waiting room.
THE REVOLUTION OF MOBILE GAMES
The arrival of mobile games has broadened the audience and redesigned the market: while the sector of living room videogames continues to be a Japanese-US duopoly (with Microsoft chasing the two Japanese rivals), that of titles for smartphones sees above all the opposing USA and China, as the traditional report on the state of mobile games signed by the analysis company Sensor Tower has just confirmed.
But how much do the main market players earn with mobile games, including those who set up the virtual showcases, or rather the stores? This information is difficult to find, which we do not even find in the detailed report we have just written . On the other hand, there is a trace of it in the Microsoft correspondence concerning the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, based on the analyzes of Newzoo.
TENCENT IN THE LEAD DOUBLE APPLE
The House of Redmond intends to exploit them to demonstrate how Tencent firmly dominates the mobile market. And in fact they are definitely impressive numbers. Tencent's Chinese earn something like 32.5 billion dollars from mobile games, Apple chases but stops halfway, with 14.8 billion dollars, while Google is only third with 12.4 billion dollars.
The three software houses alone cover 64% of the global mobile market in terms of revenues in 2022. In fact, smartphone games allow Apple to get as much as Microsoft gets from Xbox, with the former at 14.8 billion in 2022 and Xbox at 15.56 billion in the same period. But for Apple they are easy to say the least earnings, based on the sales of games produced by other teams and publishers. This also gives an idea of why Microsoft intends to get its hands on King, considering the prominent position it would later assume within this market segment that knows no crisis.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/circular-economy/guai-a-chiamarli-giochini-ecco-quanto-guadagnano-tencent-apple-e-google-con-i-giochi-mobile/ on Sun, 26 Mar 2023 06:56:02 +0000.