Mobile Gaming Emerging as Leading Sector in 2024

When you think of gaming, you probably imagine that the most popular platforms for this popular pastime today are consoles like the PlayStation 5. But in fact, for a while now, it has been smartphones that have been ruling the roost and calling the shots in the development of the global games industry.

In fact, today over 50% of the global game industry’s $300bn a year revenue is thought to come from mobile games. From new monetization models, to changes in consumer behavior, this once niche segment of the gaming market has grown to become the future of the industry.

Key Real Money Driver

Part of the reason mobile gaming is gathering so much interest nowadays is that it encompasses a much larger variety of experiences than a dedicated games console can. For example, increasingly over the past decade, the world of iGaming – which encompasses the likes of daily fantasy sports and thousands of high quality online casinos – has come to center its focus on mobile platforms.

It’s easy to see why. This rapidly growing market has identified in the mobile space a much larger theoretical market ceiling than what it can expect on more traditional web browser-enabled devices like PCs.

After all, some 86% of all people own a smartphone today, and these devices have fast come to be the default way new people in emerging economies are coming online, thanks to their accessibility, affordability and cheap cellular data plans.

That makes them ideal for the fast moving and browser optimized iGaming market, and this is resulting in the growing popularity of dedicated comparison platforms like Vegasslotsonline UK who have taken on the service of collating and ranking dedicated mobile-ready online casinos for prospective patrons to explore. What’s with, sites such as these have also come to furnish players with a huge array of competitive welcome bonuses and a range of other real money sign-up offers, making them a cost effective as well as efficient way to access iGaming on your smartphone today.

The Future of Esports

The 2020s has seen the rise of competitive video gaming, better known as esports. While this phenomenon has been around for literally decades, it was a long and slow climb towards widespread public recognition – yet that watershed moment finally came at the outset of the new decade.

Now, esports is widely considered to be the single fastest growing sport on earth, outcompeting the likes of T20 cricket, Formula 1 and MMA. What esports has on many of its rivals is relatability, after all. The average person will be able to identify and understand what they’re seeing when they watch an elite match of Call of Duty, for example, given the widespread appeal of such titles among the public.

But there’s more to it than that. One of the big shifts that has been occurring has been the way these games are played. You see, top tier esports like League of Legends often necessitate someone owning a good quality, powerful gaming PC in order to run the game smoothly and capably. That’s outside of the reach – and interest, of a great many people. What people do have access to however, is of course their smartphones.

Accordingly, over the past several years esports has gained popularity, it has been the growing number of popular smartphone-optimized esports that have really shown the fastest growth. These range across all popular esports genres, with Free Fire offering F2P battle royales, and the likes of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang serving up MOBA thrills without the learning curve of a complex control system.

While it’s difficult to predict when exactly mobile esports will come to out-and-out represent the most popular sector of the world’s new favorite sport, the charts do not lie. Year on year, mobile esports are climbing the rankings and pushing legacy esports off the top spot. It’s hard to imagine a future where this trend doesn’t continue to play into the hands of mobile sports gamers. After all, part of the reason a game like soccer is such a global favorite is that everyone owns, or can easily acquire, a football.

While not a perfect analogy, smartphones are far more ubiquitous than gaming PCs, and esports is pivoting towards mobile as a natural response to this demand.