Asia Pacific continues to lead the way in social and online games playing according to recent data from comScore. Almost 48 million Internet users in the Asia Pacific access an online gaming site on a daily basis. Worldwide, 145 million users played online games every day in April, the data reveals.
Europe is another key market, with 45.6 million daily players, followed by North America, where 30.3 million people access online games daily. Latin America comes fourth with 14.9 million daily players but experts predict that the Latin American market is set to develop further over the next few years.
Asia remains a key market for investors, with various companies planning to expand in the region. Philippines-based listed gaming PhilWeb, for example, has recently announced plans to expand its operations to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Palau, Nepal and Mongolia this year.
This dynamic growth is all the more interesting when you consider that over 1 billion smartphones will be shipped annually by 2016 but that less that 15% of phones in the world in use today (over 6 billion phones) are smartphones. With mobile gaming growth outstripping landline broadband gaming growth the potential for digital Pay2Play entertainment remains vibrant.