Gamma Data released its 2022 Casual Game Development Report showing that the casual game market size is about 34.4 billion yuan.
The value of this scale is close to 34.65 billion yuan last year, around the peak of the casual game market.
RELATED NEWS
The Ohayoo-supported report also indicates that by 2022, the overseas market revenue of China’s self-developed mobile games exceeds US$17 billion, of which casual games account for just under 5% , while markets such as the United States and the United Kingdom account for more than 20%. Therefore, domestic games still have a lot of room to develop in foreign markets.
When it comes to casual games like puzzles and parkour, the 2D graphics-based style doesn’t seem to match the general trend of industrial upgrading in the industry. However, today’s games do not stop at a mere match-3 game, but a combination of game genres.
The report shows that among the top products with more than a million downloads, match-3 fusion object is the most popular, simulation games account for the second largest number, second only to puzzle solving. Simulation game downloads will increase further to 30%. The action and shooting genres also ranked in the top 3 in terms of number of casual games and mostly fit the definition of a traditional casual game.
According to statistics from, more than 70% of the top casual game products with in-app purchases have been active for more than 3 years, and half of them have been active for 6 to 10 years.
Due to the small market size and low ARPU compared to heavy games like MMOs, casual games are at the lower end of the development chain. By 2022, game companies typically have more than 5 people on a team, and large teams are popular with more than 100 people but only 6%. In addition, due to the impact of the epidemic, personnel costs have been invested more for small game teams, more than 60% of personnel have been cut.
The report predicts that by 2022, the number of mobile casual game users in China will be 520 million. Just looking at the numbers, many would misjudge that casual games have no social interaction, in fact, from a global perspective, these games are all strongly social. In the future, this game segment has a lot of room for development.