The Results of 2022, Conclusions, and Decisions
On December 15th, the Hyper Games Conference held a panel on "The Results of 2022, Conclusions, and Decisions" moderated by Anna Petukhova, Business Development Manager at OpenMediation. The panel featured Emma Raz, Director of Commercial at NumberEight, Daniel Kesner, Head of Publishing at Moonee, and Piyush Mishra, Head of Growth Marketing at Product Madness.
The mobile game market saw a high number of users and revenue in 2020 and 2021, but experienced its first year-over-year decline in 2022, according to Sensor Tower’s Industry Trends report. The panelists acknowledged that the decline is partly due to the current recession and changes in privacy, which have affected hyper-casual games. However, they also noted that the number of gamers is increasing year on year and interest in gaming is actually going up.
Another key topic of discussion was the year of M&A in the ad tech industry and gaming space. The panelists emphasized the challenge of adapting to changes in a new privacy era, which is still ongoing in 2023 with the introduction of Google's privacy sandbox.
The panel highlighted the biggest challenge in the industry, which is how small gaming studios will make money with the shift from user behavior targeting to contextual targeting. They explained that all the bigger publishers would get the bigger share because their users would convert for any advertising, but smaller studios would struggle as the exploration part of the industry was always based on user-level data. With the privacy era, things are changing, and it is becoming harder to understand which new inventory would convert.
The panel also discussed the programmatic space and how it is unprepared to support first-party data yet. This lack of support is impacting monetization revenue and UI effort.
Overall, game studios need to pivot and adapt faster, and being a little bit smaller can be an advantage for some studios in 2023. And the industry will need to evolve in 2023 to address these challenges.
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKOm-tQlkVM