Facebook’s gaming marketing insights report provides research into player behaviour, their motivations, preferences and habits. It illustrates the increasingly important role of community, especially in the current landscape post-COVID. Finally, it takes a broader look at general consumer behaviour and how, in a world that’s becoming increasingly platform agnostic, marketers must meet the players where they are.
The main gaming marketing insights gleaned from the research were:
- 2020 brought new and different gamers
- The number of people playing mobile games significantly increased across the globe as a result of COVID-19 e.g. in Q2-Q4 in the UK, the number of mobile gamers grew by 50% or 8.6m people
- The increase doesn’t seem temporary
- Many mobile gamers who started playing after the initial COVID-19 outbreak are still playing today
- 70% of people report spending more time on mobile devices
- Demographics, behaviors, and preferences change
- New mobile gamers (people who started playing after the COVID outbreak) are significantly younger than existing players (people who were playing before) in the US, UK and Germany
- New mobile gamers show more “core” behaviors in terms of genre preferences, engagement, and propensity to play non-mobile games
- South Korea is an anomaly; new mobile gamers are older and prefer more casual genres
- Familiarity is becoming increasingly important for mobile game discovery with only a quarter (or less) of people saying they’ve tried mobile games they’ve never heard of
- Community activities outside of gameplay increased throughout 2020 with streaming platforms seeing record viewing hours
- New mobile gamers still prefer to play solo, but they’re more likely to engage with multiplayer and social features than existing players
- Purchasing behavior shifts
- In all countries, new mobile gamers spend more money in-game than existing players
- Existing gamers are more engaged than before COVID-19, yet less likely to report spending money on mobile games compared to before the outbreak
- Online purchases grew as consumers expressed concern about going into physical stores
Click here to read the full gaming marketing insights report.
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