This is some data that is NOT in the upcoming 2019 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report. This post focuses on a subject near and dear to my heart — gaming! We did a spotlight in the last Global Internet Phenomena Report, and the gaming data from region to region was pretty varied; this isn't the case for the Mobile Report.
The clear worldwide leader in usage of bandwidth in mobile gaming was Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG), which was #1 in three of the five regions (Europe, APAC, and the Middle East), and #2 in the other two regions (North America and LATAM). Traffic for PUBG was significantly higher than for Fortnite on mobile, which may reflect a shift in playing Fortnite on larger screens since it was released on consoles earlier than PUBG, and PUBG users are still happy with their mobile devices.
What is surprising is the #1 mobile game in North America and Latin America.
Pokemon Go was the #1 game in both regions, with PUBG coming in second in both. That was certainly not the result that I expected, but Niantic's work to keep the game fresh is apparently still driving user engagement.
I am still waiting for the Niantic game I expect to take mobile networks by storm: Harry Potter's Wizard's Unite, which is still not launched after being pushed into 2019 from an original launch date forecast of 2018.
I'll have at least one more blog in the lead up into the release of the 2019 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report, so stay tuned! If you are interested in the Mobile Internet Phenomena Report, we will have two webinars on the report data:
Wednesday, February 20: 10am Eastern Time (For Americas and Europe)
Wednesday, February 20: 9pm Eastern Time (For Asia Pacific)
The full report will be released on Monday, February 10th on www.sandvine.com/phenomena.