Last year, the gaming industry lost 176 million users due to a variety of difficulties and challenges, and online gaming played its part in this downturn. Although the number of online gamers dropped by 27.5 million in 2022, the entire market will pick up again this year and witness impressive user growth.
According to data presented by Sports Lens, the number of people playing video games is expected to grow by 100 million year-over-year, reaching 1.1 billion by 2023.
One seventh of the world’s population plays online games; the number of users to touch 1.2B by 2025
Gaming has often been stereotyped as isolating and unsociable, but the pandemic has shown that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Millions of people have grabbed their controllers and keyboards to escape the boredom and isolation of the COVID-19 lockdowns, looking for a way to stay entertained and maintain social connections. Online gaming was the number one choice for many.
According to a Statista survey, three years ago there were around 835 million gamers online. After the pandemic hit, this number jumped to over a billion in a matter of months and kept rising. In 2021, there were already 1.1 billion gamers online, but the number dropped to 1.07 billion in 2022, one of the most challenging years for the entire gaming industry.
Statista expects the number of users to recover to 1.13 billion this year, or one seventh of the world’s population. Although the annual growth of users will slow down, more than 67 million people are still expected to join the online gaming community by 2025, with the total number of users close to 1.2 billion people.
Following projected growth of 100 million users by 2023, Statista expects online gaming revenue to rise 10% year-on-year to $26 billion worldwide. By 2025, this figure will touch almost $30 billion.
China, South Korea, and Japan have the largest online gaming reach
While China and the United States alone generate 46% of total online gaming revenue, the US is not even in the top three countries when looking at the reach of online gaming between the population.
By 2023, the US online gaming industry is expected to have around 74 million users, with a user penetration rate of 22%, less than China, South Korea or Japan.
After a challenging 2022, the Chinese online gaming market will reach almost 373 million users this year, with an impressive user penetration rate of 25.5%.
Although South Korea has only half as many online gamers as Japan, the country trails China with a 24.3% penetration rate and 12.5 million users in 2023.
Japan rounds out the top three group, with 27.9 million online players and a penetration rate of 22.3% as of this year.
