The start of a new year often brings with it a number of interesting info-dumps, as various companies and organisations that track the industry's vital statistics show us how their corner of the world measured up in the previous year. This year is no exception, and January has already bestowed upon us a host of stats that give us a sense of how 2020 measured up for the industry -- and especially for the industry's sales and revenues.
Perhaps the most striking nugget of data from what's been released thus far is a stat from mobile app tracking service App Annie, which reported that around two-thirds of the revenues from mobile games last year were from what it classified as "core games" -- titles like PUBG Mobile and Honour of Kings, which are competitively oriented, and focused largely on the teen and young adult male demographic that was the industry's traditional bread and butter, and which generally wouldn't look out of place on a PC or console. Combine that statistic with another, which pegged the percentage of overall mobile revenues coming from game software at around 72%, and you've got roughly half of the money pouring through Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store being spent on these core games.

The triumph of mobile core games heralds a demographic shift | Opinion | GamesIndustry.biz