Russian online game market shows 2.4-fold increase in two years

The turnover of Russia’s online game market, which includes multiplayer, social, mobile and casual games, increased 2.4 times in the period from 2010 to 2012 totaling $0.9B, according to a study of the Gaming industry in Russia conducted by Mail.Ru Group.

The total volume of the PC gaming market totaled $1.3B in 2012, growing by half in two years. However, while the share of offline games in 2010 (computer and console video games) was 60% of the revenue, the sales dropped by 12% to $485M in the past year, and their share in the revenue structure of the market was estimated at 36%.

The share of MMO games in the turnover of online games market decreased from 64% in 2010 to 47% in 2012, while the share of social games increased from 23% to 41% over the same period. According to Mail.ru, on average, users are ready to spend 464RUR a month on social games, and 5% of users spend more than 3K RUR.

The share of casual games (card games, puzzles, etc.) decreased from 8% to 1%, and the share of mobile games increased from 5% to 11%. The spread of smartphones has contributed to the growth in mobile game sales in Russia up to $99M. The most popular platform among smartphone and tablet gamers is Android, the share of iOS is less than half. Console games dominated PC games in the offline gaming segment ($276M and $209M respectively).

About 75% of PC game users are ready to buy games, and about 60% of them are ready to purchase in-game content, the study of Mail.ru says.