Online gaming continues to grow in Russia due to more mobile use and the affordability of the hobby. According to Yandex.Worstsat, “Online games” receives over 4 million impressions per month. Searches patterns for online gaming on Yandex indicate noteworthy seasonality trends for the industry. Online gaming peaks during winter when more users are inside and slightly decreases in summer when more people are traveling or outside enjoying the warm weather.
Users search for a number of game specific queries or genres of games but a number of broader searches dominate the way Russians search for online games. “Online games for free” receives 1.6 million impressions per month but the query for “Free game” (excluding the keyword online) displays 6.6 million impressions per month. The biggest query that stands out is the way gamers differentiate between games for male and female players. As seen below, some of the top queries are gender specific games.
The top seven Yandex queries for online gaming in Russia are as follows:
- Games online
- Games online free
- Download games
- Free games
- Play online
- Games for boys
- Games for girls
The majority of this Russian online gaming traffic is coming from desktop devices. The top related query from mobile devices is “download games” and it’s likely that many users are also directly accessing app stores to purchase and download games for their mobile devices. Combined, desktop and mobile gamers in Russia total almost 60 million users.
According to Newzoo, 27% of Russia’s online gaming revenue comes from mobile at around 351 million. Mobile gaming brought in 165 million just two years ago, and 100 million three years ago. The industry is rapidly growing due to increased use of mobile devices and reasonable cost of connectivity.
Overall, current revenue from gamers stands at $1.3 billion, which is expected to grow 5.2% by 2018. By comparison to other markets worldwide, Russia draws in the 12th highest revenue for the online gaming industry. Despite significant search volume for free online games, more than half of the Russian online gaming community spend money on gaming. On average a Russian online gamer spends $40.95 per year on their online gaming hobby.
