The curve has reversed. For the first time in fifteen years and the advent of the smartphone, the global mobile video game market saw its revenues decrease in 2022. The sector, which was until now the most prolific branch of the first cultural industry, observed a decline of 6.4% from the previous year, according to a report by the specialist firm Newzoo. If they remain high, its annual revenues estimated at 92.2 billion dollars (86.22 billion euros) put an end to a long series of years of growth, which was exacerbated in 2020 (+ 25.6% on one year) and 2021 (+7.3%) when the Covid-19 pandemic had amplified the consumption of video games on most media.
One of the reasons put forward by experts to explain this reversal: the implementation, in recent months, of new restrictions on advertising tracking which have undermined the economic model of publishers of video games for mobiles, essentially based on targeted advertising.
A wind of privacy in the mobile application market
In April 2021, Apple opens hostilities and launches App Tracking Transparency (ATT) with update 14.5 of its iOS operating system. This functionality asks its users if they accept or refuse, application by application, advertising tracking. “Before this, on iOS devices, each application had default access to a unique identifier per user called IDFA. [IDentifier For Advertisers] and which allows advertising agencies working with application publishers to build user profiles.explains Pierre Laperdrix, researcher at the CNRS and co-author ofa study in 2022 on the tracers present in mobile video games.
In March 2022, the rate of players who refused this ad tracking was 54% worldwide and 49% in France, according to AppsFlyer
The interest of IDFAs: to offer users personalized advertisements based on cross-referencing of information collected through various applications and to precisely evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. But with Apple’s ATT, iOS game publishers now need their explicit consent to collect a player’s advertising ID. In March 2022, according to a report by AppsFlyerthe rate of players who refused this advertising tracking was 54% worldwide and 49% in France.
Less in a hurry to restrict the advertising tracking of its users, because much more dependent on advertising, Google, whose Android operating system equips more than 70% of smartphones on the planet, is however preparing to follow in Apple’s footsteps. Its parent company, Alphabet, presented on Tuesday, February 14, the deployment in beta version of its Privacy Sandbox project. In a blog postAnthony Chavez, Google executive, talks about “new APIs [interfaces de programmation d’applications] putting privacy first and not using identifiers that can trace your activity across apps and websites.”
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