Gaming revenue worldwide 2022, by device

In 2022, mobile remained the biggest gaming segment worldwide with approximately 103.5 billion U.S. dollars in annual revenues. The console segment ranked second with 53 billion U.S. dollars and PC gaming ranked last.

Gaming revenue

Revenues in the gaming industry are based on three major sources. Hardware, such as consoles, processors, screens, controllers, and other accessories; software, the actual games, as well as in-game purchases and live services. Some of the most important players in the computer and video games publishing market are Sony Computer Entertainment (Japan), Tencent Holdings Limited (China), Microsoft (United States) and Nintendo Company Ltd. (Japan). Traditional console and PC gaming companies may have worldwide name recognition but mobile gaming publishers are no slouches either: Shenzhen Tencent Tianyou Technology Ltd (formerly known as Tencent Mobile Games) generated more than 95 million U.S. dollars in monthly app revenues in September, and the top-ranked mobile game publishers generate revenues worth millions in the double-digits every month. Several mobile gaming publisher have gone from being an indie company to an IPO in just a few years, with Rovio Entertainment, King, and Zynga just being a few examples of the mobile gaming boom in the mid-2010s.

Mobile gaming monetization

The majority of mobile gaming revenues are generated via smartphones, with tablet devices only accounting for a small share of mobile gaming gross. In 2021, paying casino app users generated an average of 1.75 in-app purchase transactions, ranking highest among all measured gaming genres worldwide. The average number of in-app purchases per paying user increased across all gaming genres in 2020-2021 as user engagement with gaming soared during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Another survey of mobile gaming developers found that platformers are the highest-monetizing free-to-play genre.