A year ago I wrote a blog about the growing popularity of eSports and the rise of mobile gaming in Asia in the last few years. A year on from that blog we have seen some serious progress in mobile gaming performance, including the launch of many titles on mobile like PUBG and Fortnite. These games were originally developed to be played on powerful desktop and console machines. What has surpassed expectations of game industry enthusiasts is the speed of mobile adoption of these gaming titles. The sheer demand from the general public for these titles to be on mobile could not be ignored by publishers, and we are arguably seeing for the first time, the emergence of entirely multi-platform games over a range of devices from desktop, console to mobile.
Newzoo, our go-to partner when it comes to analysing the international gaming scene, have produced a fantastic Global Games Report, and the report that you can download below, is a mobile and eSports specific supplementary report. The report details the audience, monetary value and hardware at the core of mobile gaming. It also touches on the ever growing audience for eSports, and how eSports could potentially be an industry worth 1 billion Dollars come the early 2020s. The desire for increasingly core, competitive, and sophisticated experiences on mobile has led hardware brands to announce and release dedicated mobile gaming devices enabled by Arm technology.
We have another Newzoo report from last year on High Fidelity Mobile Gaming (HFMG) and some of the figures from that, looking back, are staggering. Even from just one year ago, the figures have grown massively and ahead of predictions. The growth of mobile gaming has been sensational, especially in Asia, where it has jumped massively ahead of any of the other continents. China in particular has really leaped ahead in consumption of, and demand for mobile gaming. With huge game titles attracting millions of active daily users, along with multiple millions in revenues, the mobile gaming market really is an industry to be reckoned with.
One of the trends I’ve noticed in technology lately is the lack of willingness of influencers and senior key people from the industry to make bold predictions on the future. At one talk I recently attended, the speaker actually referenced the gaming industry as one that has taken most technology enthusiasts by surprise. The emergence of such platforms like Twitch has sky rocketed the popularity of watching people play games in a fun and interactive way that entertains audiences. The rise of popularity of eSports is partly down to the platforms like Twitch massively popularizing games, so much so that people will pay money to watch. This has resulted in the eSports revenue forecast as seen below which you can see shows a healthy growth prediction into 2022.
To be honest, even in my late twenties I think I don't fully appreciate the popularity behind Twitch streaming and the general trend of watching people play games online. Considering platforms like YouTube are barely a decade old, it shows the speed of adoption for these new platforms that clearly fill a demand gap for the industry. New gaming phones even have the capability to allow you to stream directly to Twitch while playing.
The growth of eSports has even been recognized by world-renowned multi-sport events. The 2018 Asian Games, which is currently taking place, is demonstrating a number of eSports events for the very first time, including two mobile titles – Supercell’s Clash Royale and Tencent’s Arena of Valor. The 2022 Asian Games has already made a commitment to include eSports events in four years’ time. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee is discussing whether to include eSports events in the 2024 Olympic Games for the very first time.
Higher performing mobile phones are become more accessible to consumers worldwide. In fact, as of June 2018, there were 1 billion high-end activity smartphones globally, with this figure representing year-on-year growth of 76 percent. Pablo Fraile, Director of Ecosystems at Arm recognises this astronomical growth in the Newzoo report; in addition to the significant role that Arm has played. He says:
“The rise of mobile gaming has been fuelled by the availability of powerful smartphones offering a premium gaming experience, regardless of the price-point. Arm enables this by continually developing more performant and efficient GPUs, processors and development tools to support the mobile gaming market.”
Arm continues to play a role in the mobile gaming evolution. Earlier this year Arm announced the Mali-G76 which delivers high-performance gaming and cross-platform experiences through a 30 percent uplift in efficiency and performance density. These enhancements provide developers with more performance headroom to bring more high-end gaming titles to the mobile app ecosystems and new apps that integrate emerging technologies, such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality.
I look forward to seeing where the latest wave of mobile innovation takes gaming. Who knows, we might even be seeing eSports competitors with AR glasses at the 2024 Olympics in Paris?
Download the report to get the facts and figures of the mobile gaming opportunity:
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