Last year witnessed the continuation of the steady growth of the Russian gaming market, which reached $1.3 billion in turnover, up 16% from 2011, according to a report released last week by Mail.Ru Group, a leading Russian Internet group.
The growth of the gaming market is driven mostly by the online segment, the research points out. Its size increased 2.4 times in one year, and accounted for 64% of the entire gaming market in 2012.
Inside the online segment, however, the situation has changed. Although massive multiplayer games (MMO) are still in the lead with the result of $402 million, social games are close on their heels with $353 million. Mobile games are also on the rise with $99 million.
The offline segment continued to shrink slowly, with this trend being led by the games for PC, the turnover of which fell from $270 million in 2011 to only $209 million in 2012. Last year also marked the point when console games in Russia overtook PC games, growing 2% year-to-year.
According to another study carried out by Mail.Ru Group, gaming consoles need to offer customers advanced graphics capacities in order to grow further in Russia. In a survey conducted among more than 4,000 Russian consumers, more than 41% of the respondents said advanced graphics is what they most want to see. 15.3% opted for technological innovations and 13.1% for exclusive games.
Meanwhile, the growth perspectives of the Russian gaming market are mostly dependent on the online and mobile segments. In March, the Moscow-based consultancy J’son & Partners forecast that the mobile gaming in Russia will grow from $392 million in 2012 to an estimated $707 million in 2016.
As for the online segment, earlier this year Mail.Ru Group released a study which showed that spending on this kind of games across the CIS countries (excluding Ukraine) reached $1.3 billion in 2012 and propelled the market to a position ahead of the film industry, which had total box office earnings of $1.25 billion).
Russian gaming market size, in millions of dollars
Market structure
(Source: Mail.Ru Group)
