Setting for games – Newspaper Kommersant No. 45 (7490) dated 03/17/2023
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The number of downloads of mobile games in Russia in the fourth quarter of 2022 reached a maximum in a year and a half, although it decreased by 11% in general over the past year, Sensor Tower calculated. This is close to the overall decline of the European market, which was 8%. At the same time, the cessation of the normal operation of payments through the App Store and Google Play froze Russian spending on games below $70 million per quarter. They are down over 70%. To save revenue, developers are transferring payment instruments and entire games to browser versions, market participants note.
Kommersant got acquainted with the report of Sensor Tower analysts on the state of the mobile video game market in 2022. It follows from this that the number of downloads of mobile games in Russia decreased by 11% year-on-year, but in the fourth quarter it amounted to 673 million, reaching the level of the third quarter of 2021. Despite a decline in the spring and summer of 2022, Russia remains Europe’s largest market, accounting for 24% of downloads in the region in the fourth quarter.
At the same time, in-game payments through the infrastructure of the App Store and Google Play services in Russia fell by 72% year-on-year. Over the past three quarters, they have remained about the same level, below $70 million per quarter (that is, the fall has always been more than 68% compared to the first quarter of 2022).
After Apple left Russia due to hostilities in Ukraine, the only means of payment available on its infrastructure was replenishment of the balance from the account of mobile operators MTS and VimpelCom. Google has completely disabled the Google Play payment infrastructure in Russia. According to Sensor Tower, in-game spending across the App Store and Google Play in Europe as a whole decreased by $11% in 2022, to $2.3 billion. Payments declined in all major markets in Europe: Germany (down 6% yoy) , Great Britain (by 13%), France (by 4%). Total mobile game downloads in Europe fell 8% year-on-year to 2.7 billion.
However, statistics regarding payments may be incomplete. In 2021-2022, Apple and Google, following disputes with app developers, allowed directing users to payment pages in browser versions; Sensor Tower does not take them into account. A Kommersant source in the gaming industry noted that developers present in the Russian Federation, after restrictions on payments in the App Store and Google Play, began to actively connect such services. According to him, the transition to web-based solutions even allowed some publishers to increase revenue, but “it is difficult to aggregate information on them.”
Mobile game developers are transferring not only payment instruments to the web, Vasily Ovchinnikov, head of the Organization for the Development of the Video Game Industry, clarifies: “There has been a trend in the revival of the direction of browser games, close to mobile gaming.” According to him, updates to the Safari mobile browser became a prerequisite for this. Due to the disconnection of the usual payment instruments, the mobile gaming market “faced the need to find alternative ways to publish games, open foreign legal entities and accounts.”
The growth in the number of game installations speaks of the prospects of the market in Russia, Astrum Entertainment CEO Sergey Efremov believes: “The mobile market will change – this is a global trend as a whole, but it will definitely continue its development.” He notes that while the market has shrunk due to payment platform restrictions, “this offers the prospect of developing alternative audience aggregation and monetization points.”
Alexey Koptsev, CEO and founder of the Cyberia Nova studio, adds that in order to improve the monetization of games in Russia, not only convenient payment tools should appear, but also “the habit of using these tools”, and alternative Russian Android app stores should offer an assortment “no worse than in App Store and Google Play.
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