TouchArcade Rating:

Many of our readers often complain that we seem to be talking a lot about how F2P is the way of the future and how traditional gaming seems to be going the way of the dinosaurs. We may be talking often about how mobile gaming is increasingly synonymous with F2P games, but we are only bringing to you the constantly-increasing flow of news and reports that all appear to be saying the same thing: mobile gaming is rapidly growing, and is overwhelmingly F2P. Today I’m bringing you yet another report, this one from Grand View Research (GVR), that not only talks about how mobile gaming is showing a faster growth than console, but actually predicts a great shift of console and PC gamers to tablet gaming by 2022. And the even more interesting part is that when this report refers to mobile gamers, it pretty much describes your average casual F2P gamer.

Let’s look at the report a bit more closely. GVR’s report on Mobile Games Market Analysis and Forecasts to 2022 describes how the gaming market is expected to be driven by the shift of gamers towards mobile gaming at the expense of more “traditional" gaming platforms. These mobile gamers are, very interestingly, described as gamers who primarily make purchases to extend their gameplay, for quick progressions, to unlock new content, and to enhance characters, all features that primarily describe F2P players rather than hardcore gamers. However, GVR’s forecast does note some causes for concern when it comes to mobile game development because of the “low monetization rate" of gamers that’s expected to create problems for an industry with constantly-increasing development and user acquisition costs.

Keep in mind that this wasn’t the only report that sees this shift from console and PC to mobile gaming, with all that such a shift entails for the future of gaming. As Carter Dotson has talked about in a recent story regarding mobile game dominating console gaming, it’s easy to see how traditional publishers will want a piece of the increasingly-larger revenue pie that mobile gaming represents. Before you all start saying “Well, I’m not a F2P casual gamer," you have to remember that reports guide investments and publishing decisions. So, if analysts see the future as both mobile-based and F2P, guess what games we’ll be getting.