The number of gamers is increasing, but the revenue of the industry is falling for the first time in 15 years

During the quarantine and pandemic, video games and streaming services have exploded into a bloated industry. After the pandemic is left behind, it seems that these bloated markets quickly returned to their former state, but the situation in the gaming industry is a little different.

Newzoo’s latest Global Gaming Market Report shows that the number of people playing games worldwide has increased by 4.6 percent this year. This data is impressive because it is revealed that people who started playing games during the pandemic continue to play after the process.

There are 3.2 billion players

On the other hand, the Middle East and Africa was the market that saw the biggest increase in the number of players, reaching 488 million with an increase of 8.2 percent this year. Latin America followed with an increase of 4.8 percent and the Asia-Pacific region with 4.2 percent. The least increase was in North America with 2.6 percent. The total number of players reached almost 3.2 billion.

Revenues fell for the first time in 15 years

The Kovid-19 epidemic period also created a significant doping effect on game revenues. So much so that the growth between 2020 and 2022 was $43 billion more than Newzoo had predicted. However, after the quarantine, there was a 4.3 percent decrease in revenues and regressed to 184 billion dollars annually. Although revenues have fallen for the first time in 15 years, it should be noted that the gaming industry has weathered the economic turbulence of 2022 better than many other industries.

Almost half of all global gaming revenue came from the Asia-Pacific region ($87.9 billion), while North America generated just over a quarter ($48.4 billion) of revenues. Another detail to note is the Middle East and Africa, which increased its game revenues by 6.6 percent to $6.8 billion.

As usual, most of the money came from mobile games, which accounted for 50 percent of total revenue, or $92.2 billion, in 2022. This was followed by console games with 28 percent ($51.8 billion) and download/boxed PC games with 21 percent. Newzoo estimates that by 2025, more than 3.5 billion people will be able to play games and will spend approximately $211.2 billion.