Mobile Games Continue to Rake in Mad Money

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone when I say mobile games are doing well these days. There’s a reason that Konami, EA, and Nintendo alike all decided to either shift focus to the Mobile, or begin developing for mobile in earnest. It’s where most of the moneys at, and it’s where the audience is. Sure, hardcore gamers might rally against it, but this is the exact same thing that happened to the Wii: by being accessible and cheap, it gets a giant leg-up over the competition and draws the attention of those who want to emulate—or get a slice of—that success.

Well, if you want an idea of HOW successful this new frontier of gaming is, I suggest you check out this latest study conducted by the fine folks over at Super Data Research, who, upon compiling and analyzing sales data, has made some predictions about the amount of money each branch of the gaming world will make: and to say it’s “no contest” would be doing it a disservice.



Mobile CRUSHES the competition, as you can see in the above chart, racking in over twenty two billion dollars by the end of the year alone. The next biggest competitor, traditional retail games (boxed copies of games) is still three billion dollars behind, which is nothing to snuff at. A billion is a lot of money.

Unsurprisingly, free to play MMO’s are doing well, and thankfully better than your standard-issue social game. The lowest on the scale, Virtual Reality, has been relatively steady, while eSports, a tiny portion of the overall 74.2 billion the games industry as a whole will make, has seen some significant growth compared to years earlier. Gaming on Youtube, like lets plays and other videos, has also seen a small boost—perhaps due to how easy it is now to post content online, with the share feature on both the PS4 and the Xbox One. And as we get closer to the commercial release of the Oculus Rift, I imagine we can expert Virtual Reality sales to skyrocket.

Pretty cool stuff, right? But not surprising. Lacking any of the real blockbusters we’ve been having in the console world, I imagine 2016 will be an even larger defeat for ‘traditional’ gaming, especially as the mobile market continues to expand. Of course, that’s just the safe bet; it’s not impossible some scandal or travesty will reverse our fortunes. But let’s not make a habit out of wishing ill on others just to say we outsold them.

Unless we’re doing that to Smite. Screw Smite and it’s lack of balls.