Key data you need to know about Southeast Asia’s casual gamers

In my previous article I was looking into two big gaming markets, the United States and India. Turns out that the casual gamers are very different between these two giants. Having a huge set of user data provides some analytical challenges, but occasionally you will find interesting insights as well. I was keen to find out the differences and similarities across the South East Asian countries. That being said, I did not want to include every single country in this small study, but decided to focus on the following six: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Philippines.

As with any analysis job, the questions are just as important as the answers. I wanted to get some insights into these following questions:

1. Who are the people playing casual games?
2. Where are the most loyal gamers located?
3. Where are the most valuable users?

The data set

A few words about the data that was being used for this small study. For privacy reasons, we do not collect data from individual players. In other words, the data is anonymous and does not contain personally identifiable information. The analysis is based on a full years worth of data. This is to minimize the effects of any seasonal changes which can be significant. Think of summer school and summer holidays, big game title releases, Christmas, and so on.

Every company, website and service is unique, so it is important to keep in mind that this data can only give answers and should not be used to make too far reaching conclusions. The games we provide at Gametop.com are typically simple casual desktop (Windows/PC) games, so bear in mind that the insights from our data might not be applicable to hardcore gamers or mobile gamer segments. The full data set is roughly 80 million unique users.

Game installs versus plays ratio

Obviously the six countries that I have chosen are very different in many ways. Particularly the population size players a big role, but to figure out where the most “hardcore” players are, I was looking at the ratio between game installs and game plays.

It turns out that by far the Vietnamese gamers are the most passionate about casual games. Compared to the “least loyal” gamers from Indonesia, Vietnamese play more than two times the amount. The remaining four countries fall in between, and interestingly there is not much difference between them. The two big outliers are definitely Indonesia and Vietnam. These insights become a lot more interesting when you apply some basic demographic filters.

Who are these people anyway?

A look into the gamer demographics between US and India was a real eye opener previously, so naturally I was keen to have the same filter applied to these six countries as well. Even if “age” and “gender” are probably two of the most basic filters to use, they can tell a lot about your users. This kind of information can be valuable when considering the focus of your marketing efforts.

The following graph is sorted based on market size, Singapore is the smallest and Indonesia biggest. There is a lot to learn from this, but there are two outstanding features in the graph. Singaporean females are really not interested in casual gaming on desktops at all, and in the neighboring Malaysia it is just the opposite. In fact, the women in Malaysia play more than men. Indonesia is the biggest in terms of population size and has a mostly male dominated gaming market.

While the gender distribution is certainly interesting, it is equally interesting to look at these countries segmented into different age groups. The graph is again sorted by market size.

Show me the money

Conclusions