1. The Players in the Game Industry

The Situation of Mobile Game Industry from 2018 .01 to 2019.12 and its Future Prospects in Five Major Regions

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The past few years have witnessed a great increase in demand in the mobile game industry. More people are playing games than ever before and Covid-19 is only accelerating this upward trajectory. The current gaming market is opening new doors for growth in the coming years. To have a better knowledge of future trends, it’s crucial to gather insights about the market dynamics and current trends of the global online mobile game market, especially for game developers, investors, and potential start-ups.

Our analysis will focus on five major regions – China, US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan– due to the prevalent use of mobile games within these regions. However, due to Covid-2019 introducing deficiencies in the data from 2020 to 2021, we have decided to focus on the data from 2018.01 to 2019.12. With the diversity of features, we are confident to make multi-dimensional data analysis and find business insights into the market.

The data we are going to analyze for this project was collected from App Annie (https://www.appannie.com/en/) who is a leading global provider of mobile data. It consists of top 100 mobile games with regard to total income (USD) per month in five major regions (China, US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) where mobile games prevail. There are 12000 data points with 17 features.

Table 1. Features of Dataset

Our future project is aimed to answer the following questions:

1. What is the mobile game market capacity and potential in each region?

Regions with greater dynamism and market capacity imply more potential for future development. To identify the market capacity and potential in each region, time series tools and other methods will be employed. Even though with less novelty, it is a feasible way to get an overview of market growth potential for manufacturers and publishers in order to make correct commercial decisions.

2. Which type generated maximum revenues in 2018 and 2019, and which is the most promising type in the future?

Some novel approaches such as dimension-reduction and clustering algorithms will be applied to summarize and classify mobile games. Accordingly, we can explore the underlying characteristics of each cluster of games. It is a useful way to offer guidance to game manufacturers and publishers based on different patterns within the game clusters.

3. Which companies are the major players in this market and what are the business relationships among companies within the industry?

Identifying the major players is essential since analyzing their business model can be a referential value to others and start-ups. The potential associations among the companies are also a non-negligible aspect of business success, thus novel network visualization methods with the co-occurrence matrix will be applied. In general, the visualization methods are feasible except for some approaches such as network and community detection which can be challenging.

4. Whether a game from a well-known intellectual property(IP) gives it more intrinsic value?

A game adopted from a well-known IP might have the potential to generate more commercial value. In order to test this hypothesis, we compare the features of games with IP to games without IP. It is useful for game publishers and manufacturers to decide whether to establish a new game adopted from an IP or not.

5. What are the underlying characteristics of mobile game classification? Which game ranks first and why?

Some novel approaches such as dimension-reduction and clustering algorithms will be applied to summarize and classify mobile games. Accordingly, we can explore the underlying characteristics of each cluster of games. It is a useful way to offer guidance to game manufacturers and publishers based on different patterns within the game clusters.