Asia makes up 48 percent of the total global games market. In order to succeed in your mobile games marketing in Asia, it is crucial to know the numbers and figures and understand the key specific characteristics in each of your target countries. Our brand new eBook, An Overview of Mobile Games Marketing in Asia’s Big 3: The Chinese, Japanese and South Korean Mobile Landscape, produced in collaboration with games market research experts Newzoo, is your guide to the statistics and qualities that make up the three biggest mobile games markets in Asia.
Asia Pacific is the world’s largest market for mobile games, presenting a big, though challenging, opportunity for games publishers worldwide. The specifics of the Asian mobile games market conditions and the trends in each of its countries and regions, South Korea, Japan, China and South East Asia, represent so much variation that it’s important for publishers to get to know each one before attempting to enter the Asian market.
Welcome to the fifth instalment of our Asian Beat series! Having dived into South Korea (twice), made it big in Japan and scrutinized the behemoth Chinese market, we now move on to a smaller but extremely promising country: Vietnam. For this specific post we benefit from the insights of Anh Hoang Duc, analyst at Dynamo Partners and native of Hanoi.A couple of months ago Flappy Bird, an app developed by Dong Nguyen, a Vietnamese developer, roared out of the gates like no app before, leaving behind a mobile games industry flabbergasted by its sudden success. Flappy Bird put the Vietnamese mobile games market in the spotlight in the global developer community, and yet many of the country’s facts and figures are still not widely covered. This post aims at shedding some light on the Vietnamese mobile games market, which has many of the characteristics needed for mobile success: a young population who have grown up with smartphones and tablets as their primary internet touchpoint, widely spread internet penetration, and the booming number of smartphones.
Welcome to Asian Beat #4! Having talked about winning moves in South Korea and cracking Japan, we now move to the Chinese mobile games market.It’s no secret that the China is emerging as one of the most important mobile games markets this year. The forecasted figure for the number of Chinese mobile gamers in 2014 is 288 million, and this is predicted to rise to 770 million by 2018. China is hot on North America’s heels; according to a SuperData Research report from May of this year, the Chinese mobile games market is set to overtake the US and Japan to become the largest mobile games market in the world in 2015.
On paper at least, Japan looks as though it should be the world’s most lucrative mobile games market. A Distimo report called Asia: The Leading App Market in the World, published in January of this year, indicates that Asia is the world leader in terms of mobile app revenue with 41 percent originating from here, with Japan being the biggest Asian market.
Welcome to our second episode in our Asian Beat series!
South Korea is a mammoth opportunity for mobile game publishers. As we mentioned in the first episode of Asian Beat, South Korea’s domestic mobile gaming market reached $754 million in 2012. Smartphone penetration stood at 73 percent (of the total population of 50 million South Koreans) last August, which is significantly higher than the US (56.4 percent), and second only to the not so far ahead United Arab Emirates (73.8 percent). With 61 percent of said smartphone users playing mobile games, and the total South Korean game market being worth $9.16 billion as of October last year (Japan’s figure stood at just over half of that at $4.6 billion), this can only mean good things for mobile games advertisers in terms of new user acquisition, as well as high retention rates and revenue –if campaigns are run effectively, with consideration paid to our best practices as set out below.
Welcome to our first episode of our Asian Beat series!In this first issue we investigate the current state of the South Korean mobile games market. In particular, we look at the history of messaging app Kakao Talk as well as the reasons behind its incredible success. We also dive into the game trends, which have been rapidly evolving over the past couple of years.To begin with, a few facts and figures:
On Wednesday, February 19 we held the first episode of AppLift Webinars on the outlook of the mobile games market for 2014. We were lucky to have some great panelists onboard for this first session: