Indonesia Becomes the Third Largest Mobile Game Market in the World

VIVA – Indonesia becomes the third-largest mobile game market based on Google Play downloads. The data.ai report also found that Indonesian gamers spent a total of US$370 million (IDR5.4 trillion) on mobile games in 2022, an increase of US$50 million (IDR742 billion) from 2021.

The report titled State of Mobile 2023 Gaming also found that mobile game downloads also increased by 0.32 billion from 2021 to 3.45 billion in 2022.

Globally, total consumer spending on mobile games fell -5 percent to US$110 billion last year. This can be attributed to two trends, the global economic recession and uncertainty, and changes in user targeting regulations that impacted the revenue of mobile game publishers.

This could be a short-term correction in a long-term upward pattern, given that the world's mobile gamers currently spend around US$1.64 billion and download nearly 1.2 billion games every week.

While these numbers have yet to reach the levels of consumer spending at the height of the pandemic, gamers around the world are following a trend to continue spending beyond the total amount spent on mobile games in the first quarter of 2020, up nearly 30 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

The United States, South Korea, and Japan made the largest contributions to consumer spending levels in the world, based on Google Play downloads in the first quarter of 2023.

Meanwhile, data on iOS found that the top performers were the United States, China, and Japan. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea experienced the largest growth compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.

India and Brazil led the majority of activity on Google Play in terms of number of downloads, with Turkey, Russia and Iraq recording the largest growth in absolute number of downloads in a quarter-on-quarter comparison. 

"Our research shows that interest in mobile gaming is still very high. As one of the largest markets for the mobile gaming industry with more than 3 billion downloads last year, there are opportunities for significant growth for the gaming market in Indonesia," said data.ai's Head of Insights in a statement, on Monday. 

It also said that the dynamic gaming industry in Indonesia will continue to score extraordinary growth in the coming years.