According to Frost & Sullivan, Southeast Asia’s mobile gaming revenue is due to exceed $7 billion by 2019.
In 2014, analysis shows that Southeast Asia revenues hit $1 billion. The company’s revenue is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth of 48% between 2015 and 2019. Compared to other regions in the world, the Southeast Asia region, with a home to more than 60 million people is set grow at a much steeper rate than others.
The massive increase in first-time smart-device users and new broadband users have helped Malaysia and Singapore see rapid growth driving Southeast Asia’s revenue dramatically. An additional factor adding to the growth is the increase in social media usage.
According to the study, tablet and smartphone usage will become streamlined by 2019. In Thailand, more than half of their population are smartphone users. Tablet gaming is small, in saying that, for smartphones the average revenue is 4.2 times less than that of tablet gaming in that region.
Due to the affordability and high popularity of Chinese low-end smartphones in developing markets, Android is and will be the far dominating mobile operating system in the region. This can create issues for developers to overcome in terms of determining which version of Android to support.
Currently, there is only a small percentage of Indonesian Google Play users using Android 2.3. The platform however is only getting stronger and will no doubt become less and less of a challenge to developers.
Knowledge being spread of the games is largely due to social media such as Facebook in Southeast Asia. It is common that Southeast Asian players are playing games that are popular in the West including Line’s Lets Get Rich and Supercell’s Clash of Clans.