Asia Estimated To Spend $12.2 Billion On Mobile Gaming This Year

A new infographic from a market research report indicates that the mobile gaming sector is expected to boom this year and boom big. The chart shows exactly what sort of upward swing the mobile app market is charting for 2014 and it appears as if Asia's mobile app spending will rival America's retail software spending in the core sector.

GamesInAsia.com managed to get their hands on the infographics from Newzoo and Applift. What do the infographics say? Some very, very interesting things.

Such as last year's spending in the mobile sector included a totality of $17.5 billion spent on apps, $12.8 billion on smartphones and only $4.8 billion on tablets. The interesting thing about it is that for tablets supposedly aimed at killing portable and household console gaming, the global app revenue sure doesn't seem to sing in tune with all the corporate praise being dumped on tablets.

Of course, the chart also shows that by the end of this year, the estimated revenue is expected to hit $6.5 billion for tablets. That's definitely more than doubled what the global intake was of the total mobile market from back in 2011. However, when considering the saturation of tablets and phones (estimated to have a reach of over a billion users) the whole thing looks a little flaky.

A lot of that revenue is supposedly due to “whale” users, as many free-to-play games have very poor active user attachment rates, something that Apple wants to turn around by increasing the quality of app store releases.

Anyway, the more interesting infographic was the mobile games monetization world map “reloaded”. Check it out below.

As you can see, America trailers behind Southeast Asia pretty badly. In fact, the Japanese out-spend Americans when it comes to mobile apps. The region is all-in on mobile devices for a number of reasons, mostly to do with a tax hike, a poor economy and not enough disposal income to get their gaming fix from the larger home consoles (or not quite in comparable ways with mobile and portable gaming, anyway).

Most surprising to me is how Eastern Europe has seemingly no interest in mobile apps. They definitely seem to have taste in games if they aren't throwing money away on free-to-play mobile apps like Dungeon Keeper.

Another interesting piece of the chart is a breakdown on monetization potential, consumer price index and the global appeal of the apps and how well they score. Check it out below.

That's very interesting. I mentioned above that Eastern Europeans apparently have good taste in avoiding crap, and their average app rating seems to prove that they don't like crap. Western Europe is even more critical than their Eastern counterpart, and the rest of EMEA has even higher standards than them. Very interesting.

It looks like app producers definitely know where their target audience is based on the stats above.