Mobile and Social Gaming Industry Highlights in 2014
2014 was a huge year for the mobile and social gaming industry. According to App Annie, iOS games revenue increased by 70% year over year, and Android games revenue increased by 60% during the same period. Total mobile games revenue is expected to reach $25B by the end of 2014, surpassing console gaming which has suffered a 28% revenue decline over the last year.
What about social gaming? Looking at Facebook games, Gamasutra found that on average, 365 million users played Facebook games daily in 2014 - which is 5% higher than the year before.
Global expansion played a huge part in the growth of mobile/social games during 2014, as many of the major game publishers made an effort to localize their games in countries such as China, Japan and India. In just the first six months of 2014, China had over 330 million mobile gaming players!
What were the top mobile and social game genres of 2014? Based on the 4 major gaming platforms, a study found that Match 3 and slot-type games came out on top, while farm and building simulators followed close behind.
So where is the industry headed for 2015? We predict that social gaming will continue to rise - but also expect to see more premium games hitting the market (like Monument Valley), as the mobile gaming industry attempts to cater to core gamers. What are your predictions for 2015?
The Worst Gaming Trends of 2014
While the video game industry had a great year overall in 2014, it wasn’t without its faults. There were a bunch of AAA titles that didn’t exactly have the smoothest of launches, plagued with broken servers, bugs and incompleteness - to name a few, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Driveclub.
Another trend that didn’t do so well in 2014 was the explosion of video game releases on Steam. Since the video game distribution platform raised in popularity over the last year, it became increasingly flooded with “shovelware” in a race for developers to gain some extra money, all the while decreasing the number of overall quality games. Quantity over quality was apparently the focus in digital Steam games over the last year.
Cyberattacks also affected the video game industry negatively (as well as almost every other digital industry i.e. the Sony Hack, The Fappening). We saw several games and networks suffer from multiple hacks such as PSN, Xbox Live, League of Legends and Battle.net, with most of the attack attributed to anonymous cyber attacking groups.
Another well-known downfall within the video game industry in 2014 was GamerGate. If you’d like to learn more about what GamerGate was, check out this article with a few more video game industry trends from the year. Happy New Year!
