MDEC & SocialPeta Releases Special Report Providing Insights on In-Game Advertising for SEA
By Digital News Asia November 9, 2021
- Post-pandemic, revenue of mobile games maintains strong growth momentum
- Pandemic provides mobile games unique opportunities to develop, tap markets
Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), Malaysia’s lead digital economy agency, in collaboration with leading advertising and marketing platform SocialPeta, will be publishing a report on the trends, markets, genres and customers of the game advertising market in Southeast Asia. The report, “Southeast Asia (SEA) Game Industry Special Report: In-Game Advertising Market Insights” headlines the post-pandemic trend, recording strong growth momentum in revenue for mobile games with increased competition in the market. The report is the continuation from the Southeast Asia Game Industry Report 2021.
According to Mohan Low (pic), Director of Digital Creative Content, Tech Ecosystems & Globalisation, MDEC, “True to our clarion call to establish Malaysia as the Heart of Digital ASEAN, the report provides a detailed analysis of mobile game launch trends and popular advertisers in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2021, and listed popular ad tricks for casual games, simulated life games (SLG) and role-playing games (RPG).”
Jiahong Wei, Business Development Manager of SocialPeta said, “A trending game depends not only on its quality but also on a large number of eye-catching ad releases and creativity in the future. In order to achieve better results for their products, mobile game advertisers have increased their ads releases accordingly. From January to September 2021, SocialPeta has captured more than 10.9 million Southeast Asian mobile game ads, a year-on-year increase of 263%.”
The report outlined four key trends across SEA:
- The number of ads has increased sharply. The competition in releasing ads has intensified
- Total revenue of smartphone games was US$7.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 4.7%; the total revenue of tablet games was US$1.16 billion, 2% above its year ago level, according to NEWZOO’s statistics in the first half of 2021.
- The impact of Apple IDFA policy on ad release.
- Apple released the official version of iOS 14.5, allowing users to actively choose whether an app can track their activity to demonstrate its respect to user privacy. Some advertising platforms predict that the IDFA acquisition rate in the past was 90%, which may decrease to 30% in the future. Apple’s new policy disrupts ad release data de-duplication, attribution, and user tracking.
- The data captured by SocialPeta, from January to September 2021 showed that iOS mobile game advertisers in SEA fell by 8.7%, and the number of ads fell by 15.2%.
- Chinese developers have their ads published more frequently in SEA.
- An increasing number of Chinese developers choose to launch their products internationally. Ads published by Chinese developers accounted for more than 50% in the trending leaderboard in SEA. In addition to SEA, the United States and European countries also witnessed trending game ads from Chinese companies, especially SLGs and RPGs.
- A growing number of heavy game developers are attaching importance to media buying.
- More and more heavy mobile game developers focus on media buying this year instead of traditionally relying on high game quality and relatively loyal players. Taking PUBG Mobile as an example, the number of daily ads in the first half of 2021 was 630 pieces on average, a year-on-year increase of 31%. There are games with similar trends, such as Genshin Impact, ROBLOX, and Free Fire.
The research report, collaboration between MDEC and SocialPeta, notes that the pandemic has provided mobile games unique opportunities to develop. Coupled with geopolitical developments, evolving marketing strategies, and concerted efforts towards digitalisation, meaningful insights into the industry serve as a fundamental founding block to cultivating a robust and sustainable gaming market.
To download the full research report, visit https://www.socialpeta.com/academy/?utm_source=MDEC&utm_medium=1108 on 15 Nov. The timing of the report coincides with MDEC’s just launched digital content festival, Malaysia Digital Creativity Festival. The festival aims to expose consumers from Malaysia and around SEA to amazing content in animation, games and visual effect. To register, please go to mydcf.my and participate in the festivities.
