German game market: strong growth in 2020, especially in-game purchases

German game market

The gaming market in Germany grew very strongly in 2020, as announced by the Association of the German Games Industry ("game"). While total sales in 2019 were just under 6.5 billion euros, in 2020 it was already more than 8.5 billion. The increase of around a third within just one year is mainly due to in-game purchases and mobile games. Both areas have grown extremely strongly.

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In-game purchase will soon become dominant

Most sales in 2020 were still made with gaming hardware, which includes consoles, handhelds, gaming PCs and hardware accessories. Almost exactly as much money could be converted into in-game purchases. These are, for example, DLCs, loot boxes, skins or in-game currency. It can be assumed that the vast majority of money will be made with in-game purchases this year.

Recommended editorial content Here you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external integrations are only displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content": Load all external content I consent to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy . External content More on this in our data protection declaration. The classic game purchase follows next. Fees for online services, for example PlayStation Plus or Nintendo Switch Online, land in the penultimate place, with subscriptions at the bottom. The graph shows the distribution optically, for comparison the figures from 2019.

German Games Market 2020: Big jump in sales compared to the previous year. Source: game

Mobile games more and more important

Game apps continue to record very strong growth, with sales of almost 2.3 billion euros in Germany in 2020 - a good proportion of the Total gaming revenue of around 8.5 billion euros. The one-time purchase of a game app plays almost no role with 11 million euros in sales; instead, the in-game purchase dominates here even more than with classic video games.

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Mobile games are becoming more and more important in the German game market, sales has almost doubled since 2017. Source: game

Strong growth since 2016

The industry association game has also published a graphic on the growth of the entire German games market since 1995. It becomes clear how strongly the industry has grown in this country, especially since 2016. In relation to this, game puts the most important new hardware, services and Co. in the respective year. In addition, major technical innovations and other additional information are listed in order to classify the overall market.

The development of the German game market since 1995. Source: game Source: game market data