German gaming market grows by another 17 percent

René Resch

After the market had already grown by a historic 32 percent in the Corona year 2020, an increase of 17 percent was recorded again for 2021, as the Association of the German Games Industry (game) announced in a blog post on Monday.

In-game & in-app purchases with a 30 percent plus

The market was able to convert around 9.8 billion euros with games, online services and gaming hardware last year. Demand for gaming hardware increased by 23 percent, with the mammoth share being due to strong interest in the new consoles such as PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch OLED. Demand for gaming PC accessories increased by 22 percent and for in-game and in-app purchases by a whopping 30 percent. The data comes from the market research company GfK and data.ai.

Lockdown has created many new players

According to the association’s assessment, many of the new players who have joined the corona pandemic have remained loyal to the gaming market:

“Following the historic leap in growth in 2020, the German games market continued to grow strongly in 2021. This also shows that those who discovered games for the first time during the lockdown also enjoy them in the long term,”

says game Managing Director Felix Falk. And adds:

“The strong growth in gaming hardware is particularly gratifying. Whether game consoles or gaming PCs: Once again, gamers in Germany have invested heavily in their equipment so that they can continue to enjoy games in the best possible quality in the future. The demand could not always be met, so an even greater increase in sales would have been possible.”

In-game and in-app purchases have seen the biggest increase. In return, one-time purchases, such as the purchase of games, fell by 9 percent and subscription models also recorded losses of around 11 percent. However, Game Pass models are becoming increasingly popular, with these services seeing a 4 percent increase in revenue.