Oleg Nesterenko

IDC: video games industry revenue grows 20% in 2020 to nearly $180 billion

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According to IDC data, the total revenue of the gaming industry in 2020 is approaching $180 billion.

This is driven by both the release of next-generation consoles and the growth on mobile, which accounted for almost half of the total.

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The results of the IDC report were published on MarketWatch. An important clarification: unlike the consoles estimates, the data for the mobile and PC markets does not include hardware sales.

According to analysts, the total revenue of the entire gaming industry in 2020 will amount to $179.7 billion (an increase of 20% year-on-year).

Mobile market

  • Mobile gaming accounted for $87.7 billion of the total revenue generated by the gaming industry (an increase of 24% year-on-year).
  • The popularity of mobile is due to both cheap prices for devices (in comparison with consoles and PCs), and the dominance of China in this area.
  • China has the largest share of the mobile market in the Asia-Pacific region, with revenues of $ 56.6 billion (up 25% YoY).
  • More than half of China’s mobile market is controlled by Tencent and NetEase. In other countries, Activision Blizzard , Zynga and Glu Mobile take the lead.

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Console market

  • Console gaming accounted for $52.5 billion of the total revenue generated by the gaming industry (an increase of 20% year-on-year).
  • Most of the revenue came from the United States. In the first 11 months of 2020, US users spent $44.5 billion on video games, of which $38.4 billion came from games, $4 billion from consoles, and $2.1 billion from accessories.
  • Revenues peaked in November, when the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X | S were released. Hardware sales jumped 58% year over year to $1.4 billion per month.
  • China saw the lowest console revenues. Even after the ban on gaming consoles was lifted, it only accounts for 1% of the total console market.

PC market

  • PC gaming revenue amounted to $39.5 billion (an increase of 11% year-on-year).
  • IDC analysts believe that the share of PC revenue would have been higher if ICafes, which are in high demand in China, had not been closed due to the pandemic.
  • As a gaming platform, PC still sits between mobile and console gaming. This is due to the fact that computers themselves are more common than consoles, but there are still fewer of them than mobile devices.
  • Experts expect that the growth of the gaming industry to only slow down by 2022, when the mass vaccination of the population takes place.

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