The mobile games market is expected to generate US$46.1 billion in 2017

When people think gaming, mobile doesn’t necessarily come to mind first but given the ease of access and availability of smartphones, it’s no surprise that the mobile gaming market is on the rise.
In a technologically-driven society, the one device that you can say with assurance that everyone would have is a smartphone. In fact, according to Newzoo’s Mobile Market report, there were 2.3 billion smartphone users globally in 2016 which amounts to 31% of the population. This number is expected to grow to 3.6 billion users in 2020. With these numbers, mobile gaming has a huge audience.
In 2017, the mobile games market is expected to be worth US$46.1 billion: 42% of total global game revenue. This number is shared amongst both tablets and mobile with mobile accounting for a majority of the revenue with a value of US$36.3 billion. All of this data is from the most recent Newzoo Global Games Market report.
Even mobile games themselves are proving to be a surprising source of business with the gaming studio King (creators of Candy Crush Saga) being sold for US$5.9 billion.  Even Tencent’s Q2 report acknowledges mobile games where they highlighted the fact that their games revenue increase was primarily due to smartphone games with a 54% YoY growth in smartphone games revenue.
A few areas you should keep an eye out for as the mobile games market grows are mobile esports, the rise of mobile VR and AR technology, and support for mobile VR/AR development.