The gaming landscape in Southeast Asia is an interesting one, and this latest report compiled by Google and Niko Partners highlight some of its interesting quirks.
The key takeaway from the report is that gamers in Southeast Asia primarily play on mobile, love to play together with friends in competitive games, which leads to some community building.
In 2019, mobile games have outpaced PC and console games in terms of total revenue and downloads. And a survery by GameStart from the same year reveals 60% of gamers here prefer to play with friends, with the top 10 grossing mobile games having a multiplayer component of sorts. 5 of which are esports titles.
The top-grossing mobile games in Southeast Asia from January to June 2020, according to the report, are as follows:
- Garena Free Fire: Rampage
- Mobile Legends: Bang Bang
- Rise Of Kingdoms: Lost Crusade
- Lineage M
- Arena Of Valor
- PUBG Mobile
- Call Me Emperor
- MU
- One Punch Man: The Strongest
- AFK Arena
This trend has led the current boom of esports, which has shifted from being focused on PC games to mobile titles. Prize pool values of tournaments between 2018 to 2019 have grew 244%, a crazy rate of growth.
The popularity of mobile games and esports also drawn large numbers. Indonesia’s Mobile Legends Premier League (MPL) Season 5 grand finale had 1.1 million peak concurrent views. Streamers of these mobile games also have huge numbers too. Indonesian streamer Jess No Limit is the first to reach 15 million subscribers for an Asian game streamer on YouTube. Whereas in Malaysia, Soloz is the biggest streamer in the country with over 1.2 million subscribers on Facebook Gaming.
Console gaming, compared to mobile gaming, is niche in the region. And it doesn’t help that only PlayStation has an official presence in most countries here. Xbox only operates in Singapore, and Nintendo has none.
You can view the full infographic of the report down here, which also includes mobile gaming trends in Japan, China and India.