Mobile Gaming In Emerging Markets

Mobile gaming is already very well established in many parts of the world as it continues to be a favourite pastime for players of all ages – it has also started increasingly becoming more popular with an audience that many not have been previously considered as an older audience without much history in gaming has started to emerge. As that gap begins to bridge, the next big market to tackle is within the emerging market and many African markets top that list as regions such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Ethiopia are separating themselves as the biggest emerging tech capitals in the world. 

The first challenge to overcome is within devices themselves, the high cost of flagship devices has always provided a barrier for many but the second hand market has been rapidly growing as many users are replacing their devices well before the lifespan of the device is over leading to many devices such as iPhones having a surplus of availability for models that are barely a year or two old. These phones have been heavily introduced into these emerging markets and have been a big part of mobile growth for them.

The next challenge is within data costs, typically these same regions have lower data caps and higher data costs meaning it is more difficult for players to access these games – but this gap is certainly closing. As the infrastructure continues to improve, data costs are rapidly falling and may soon rival those in other developed parts of the world, similarly the caps are slowly being lifted too to ease the restrictions many have with data caps. 

Perhaps the fastest growing sector is within mobile casinos too, particularly during this lockdown period as many are reporting much higher numbers – despite regulation changes in countries such as the UK, this list of non uk casinos continues to remain extremely popular and is expected to be an area of growth that performs extremely well in these emerging markets, it is already expected and being shown that gaming in particular will emerge much faster in these areas on mobile devices that in did in other locations, simply because the other gaming markets through consoles and PC for example are already much smaller. 

It may be important to ensure protection is available from the beginning though – one thing currently happening in other emerging gaming markets is that players that are at risk of addiction typically haven’t had much in the way of help if things get bad for them and have only been introduced into protection methods over the past two years or so, if regulation can be put into place as the market continues to emerge and grow then it may prevent many of the issues that came before and help these regions find more success than anywhere else – with new networking through 5G becoming quickly available too and the ability to roll it out much faster than other markets, these emerging locations are perfectly poised to capitalise on as much gain as possible.