Gaming: the mobile game market experienced a sharp drop of 9.6% in Q1 2022

According to a new survey, the majority of mobile game genres saw reductions in uploads and downloads in the first half of 2022, with the overall mobile games market down 9.6% year-over-year.

In the first half of 2022, the mobile games market fell to $11.4 billion, according to new statistics from Sensor Tower Game Intelligence. The only categories that have seen their revenue increase are arcade and tabletop games.

credit: Android Authority

Arcade game revenue soared 14.8% from a year earlier to nearly $176 million. According to AppleInsider, other genres, such as hypercasual and RPG, saw declines.

Racing games saw the largest drop in revenue, down 28.8% year-over-year, and location-based augmented reality games suffered a 26% decline over the same period .

In addition to the decline in revenue, the number of mobile game downloads fell 2.5% annually to 2.4 billion.

Even though downloads were essentially constant at 1.2 billion, revenue for the second quarter of 2022 alone fell 11.4% to $5.6 billion.

According to the report, certain factors, such as inflation, the end of Covid-19 lockdowns and privacy improvements like the deprecation of the IDFA tag, are to blame for the overall decline in the mobile gaming industry.