The Candy Crush Saga logo displayed on a phone screen.
Jakub Porzycki | NurPhoto via Getty Images
Spending on mobile games declined last year as consumers got more frugal with their purchasing decisions in response to rising inflation, according to a report from app analytics firm Data.ai.
Mobile game spending fell 5% globally in 2022, to $110 billion, Data.ai, which was formerly known as App Annie, said in its “State of Mobile” report Wednesday. The report also looks at the broader state of sectors like mobile ads, retail and social media apps.
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Nevertheless, first-time installs of mobile titles rose 8% to a record 90 billion, with so-called “hypercasual” titles leading the gains.
“We are seeing this major theme emerge of people being more price sensitive and financially more conservative,” Lexi Sydow, head of insights at Data.ai, told CNBC, adding that the “biggest hit” to spending on apps was in gaming.
Faced with economic headwinds such as higher prices and borrowing costs, people are cutting back on discretionary purchases. Gaming especially has come under pressure.
Global sales of games and services, including console and PC games, were expected to contract 1.2% year-on-year to $188 billion in 2022, according to a July research note from market data firm Ampere Analysis.
In recent years, growth in mobile gaming has been the dominant story in the games industry, with major publishers making big bets on mobile game developers.
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Early last year, Take-Two bought mobile gaming firm Zynga for $12.7 billion. In 2016, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, King, was purchased by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion. U.S. tech giant Microsoft, meanwhile, is banking on continued growth in mobile gaming with its proposed $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard.
That growth has been challenged lately by a number of macroeconomic headwinds, however, including a rise in the cost of living and higher interest rates.
In 2020, Microsoft and Sony launched their respective next-generation gaming consoles, giving mobile more competition.
Last year also saw a return to in-person activities and a normalization of travel rules from the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when much of the world was hunkering down at home.
Non-gaming apps proved more resilient in 2022, according to Data.ai’s research, with the value of purchases in such apps rising 6% year-over-year to $58 billion. The growth was driven mainly by subscriptions and in-app purchases in streaming platforms, dating apps and short-form video services like TikTok.
Downloads of non-gaming apps grew 13% from the previous year, to 165 billion.
That did little to offset the slump in mobile game spending, however, with spending across app stores slipping 2% to $167 billion. The figures include installs on third-party Android marketplaces in China, where Google’s official Play app store is banned.
The market faces further headwinds in 2023, with recently introduced privacy measures from Apple expected to place greater strain on app makers.
Apple launched its App Tracking Transparency feature, which gives users a prompt asking whether they wish to be targeted by advertisers, in 2021.
Data.ai expects global app spend on games specifically to drop a further 3% to $107 billion this year as a result of decreased disposable income and changes to privacy.
Google plans to adopt privacy curbs similar to Apple’s that would limit tracking across Android apps.
“With limitations on your targeting capabilities from an advertiser standpoint, it becomes harder to attract the big whales who spend the most in games,” Sydow explained.
The changes spell trouble for Meta, owner of the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms. Meta Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned previously that Apple’s ATT could decrease its 2022 sales by $10 billion. The company made most of its $117.9 billion revenue in 2021 from advertising sales.
Meta faces tense competition from rival firm TikTok. The Chinese-owned short video app last year reached $6 billion in overall lifetime spending and is only the second non-game app to achieve that milestone after Tinder, according to Data.ai.
Sydow said the effects of Apple’s privacy measures hadn’t yet appeared in the 2022 numbers — with total spend dropping across both iOS and Google Play — but was likely to have a much greater impact this year.
Despite the overall spending slowdown in 2022, there was still “more demand for mobile service than ever before,” Sydow added. First-time app downloads grew 11% to 255 billion, Data.ai said, while hours spent in apps climbed 9% to a record 4.1 trillion.
Trust & Will founders, Cody Barbo (CEO), Brian Lamb, and Daniel Goldstein.
Courtesy: Trust & Will
Legal technology company Trust & Will said Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in a Series C funding round. The San Diego-based firm, ranked No. 41 on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised $75 million to date.
Trust & Will aims to shake things up in the arcane estate planning industry and make these key wealth preservation and wealth transfer services more accessible to families. Relying on a mix of technology and human oversight, Trust & Will provides legally valid documents that adhere to state guidelines.
The company says the funding will be used to double down on artificial intelligence.
“AI enables families and advisors to plan with greater clarity and confidence,” co-founder and CEO Cody Barbo said in a statement announcing the funding. “By combining technology with human compassion, we’re transforming how people protect and preserve their legacies.”
The new round was led by Moderne Ventures, and includes Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, UBS Next and Erie Insurance. The most recent publicly available valuation figure for Trust & Will was $169 million, according to PitchBook data as of June 2022. The company told CNBC its valuation is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and has increased by more than 5x from its 2020 Series B valuation to its new Series C, but declined to be more specific.
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Trust & Will started when two friends wondered why there weren’t more online options to create a will. Most of their financial lives were already online — banking, taxes, insurance — but wills would require thousands of dollars and talking to a lawyer. Or a barebones online template that doesn’t leave room for customization or questions.
Its closest competitors, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, focus on a broader variety of services. There’s also FreeWill.com, which offers free templates for people to fill out.
A recent annual report from Trust & Will found that although 83% of Americans believe estate planning is important, only 31% have a will, and 55% have no plan at all. Today, the company says it has helped hundreds of thousands of families create estate plans and settle probate to solve for that problem, and over one million Americans have started their legacy planning on the platform.
The company works directly with individuals and through partnerships with financial institutions. Trust & Will’s partnerships include Bank of America, USAA and Navy Federal. To get the word out to the general public, the company recently hired its first celebrity brand ambassadors, Super Bowl Champion Matthew Stafford and his wife, podcaster Kelly Stafford, to talk about their estate planning experience in a national TV commercial. It also recently became the official estate planning partner to two professional sports teams, the Los Angeles Kings and San Diego Wave.
“Every family deserves access to estate planning, and every professional deserves tools that simplify the process while delivering exceptional results,” Barbo stated in the release. “This Series C funding is more than a company milestone — it’s a step toward transforming estate planning into an essential service that touches every family’s life and legacy.”
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Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.
Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.
The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.
“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.
The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.
Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.
Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.
People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.
As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.
Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.
JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.
“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.
The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.