Mobile gaming isn't so mobile

According to a new report PayPal commissioned with SuperData in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Spain, UAE, UK, and the U.S. to learn about consumer attitudes, habits and behaviors around the digital goods economy, digital game spending is well over three times that of eBooks, and a lot of that spending is happening on consoles and PC/Mac, where players spend around twice as much as mobile players do.

Despite the notion that mobile gaming is done largely while traveling or commuting, it seems mobile games have found a home right alongside their console and PC counterparts. In most countries, the majority of time spent playing mobile games is in the bedroom or living room, or even in the bathroom - an "advantage" mobile has over the console or PC.

Aside from playing games, one rising digital consumption trend of course is streaming. More and more players are also watching videos of or about their favorite games. "Thirty one percent of those surveyed indicated that they played most of the games for the gaming video they watched, with 23 percent stating that they played all of the games. For the gaming companies, driving viewers from the gaming videos to buying the games themselves (and in-game add-ons) can be a source of revenue generation," noted PayPal.

Twitch may be best known for streaming eSports but more generally speaking, PayPal found that YouTube (80 percent) was listed as the top platform where gaming video was watched, and vertical specific platforms such as Twitch (27 percent), PlayStation SharePlay (19 percent), Ustream (19 percent) and GamingLive (16 percent) were popular as well. Perhaps more interestingly, over half of U.S. males surveyed spent $10 or more on donations for streamers; and 15% of males surveyed reported spending $30-$49, with 10% having spent $50-$69 over the past three months. Females surveyed were found to spend at a lesser rate, as 34% percent stated that they spent $10 or more over the past three months on streaming donations.

Overall, 68% of Millennials who buy digital media watch videos about games, so it's no surprise that advertisers are getting increasingly interested in streamers and other videos about games. As SuperData's Joost van Dreunen wrote for GamesIndustry.biz this week, games are becoming the new media, and "now that games have become a mainstream form of entertainment, they have the attention of millions of people and, therefore, the attention of advertisers."