Gaming Market Evaluation: Penetration Potential of New PC and Mobile Projects

The video game development industry has shown stable growth of at least 10% per year over the past two decades (Newzoo, 2019). Because of the rapid development of the whole IT sphere today, user only needs to have access to the internet (broadband or mobile) to get an opportunity to play any game from any part of the world. In order to payback development costs and make a profit, game development studios invest huge marketing resources in attracting new users worldwide. Due to the such global nature of distribution and limited marketing resources in an ever-growing market, studios should distribute marketing investments both between user acquisition channels and exact regions/countries. The aim of this work is to identify countries with the greatest penetration potential for PC and mobile gaming projects. To accomplish this objective, data for 157 countries was collected. Data describes three basic characteristics of the audience that determine the return of marketing investments (ROI): the volume and quality of the potential audience, and also the cost of its acquisition. Based on the objectives of the study, which imply the detection of patterns and the search for homogeneous groups, the k-means clustering method was chosen as the main research method. The results of the study include lists of countries with high, medium and low estimation of penetration potential. Due to a number of differences in required technologies between PC and mobile games, these two segments are considered separately and form different lists of countries.