Asia hosts the most mobile gamers in the world

A new publication by Germany-based secondary research organisation yStats.com, Global Mobile Gaming Market 2014, has found that gamers are moving away from consoles and pre-installed PC games toward mobile-based games, and also that Asia is where the highest number of mobile gamers are.

Mobile gaming is already the fastest growing segment of the video game market, slightly ahead of online gaming on PCs, said the company, and forecast to grow by about 20% annually.

Japan, China and South Korea are the top three countries for mobile gaming in the region. In Japan, mobile gaming revenues on smartphones grew five-fold in the last two years, reaching a small one-digit sum in EUR billions. 

According to yStats, regulation plays an important role in the fast-growing gaming industry in China, which favours local game publishers. Several hundreds of million people play mobile games, with the number growing every year, the company said, and the share of mobile games as a portion of total online gaming revenues is expected to increase significantly in the next four years. 

In South Korea, mobile gaming is led by a messaging app which has transformed itself into a popular gaming platform, yStats notes, and added that mobile is forecast to be the fastest growing segment in the gaming industry in India as well. 

In the Middle East, the trend to mobile is accelerating, with over 10% of mobile users in the UAE downloading games on their mobile devices.