“Should I make a Travel app?” “If I launch my game in Brazil, does it stand a chance?” These are critical questions, especially if you’re short on time, budget and dev resources. You need to make the right choices before embarking on your new app. So, how do you make those decisions? You look at market concentration. If this is new territory for you, you’re in luck — our latest report has a method you can use to analyze categories, countries or, well, anything that has market share. Using it will give you a solid indication of how hard (or easy) of a time you’ll have ahead of you before you enter uncharted waters. Still a bit lost or want some real app store examples? We put the methodology to work on the Games category. As this story’s title suggests, it’s a great time to be an indie app developer. Get all the details by downloading our latest free report: The App Annie DNA Report: Rise of the Indies.

1. The App Annie
DNA Report Rise of the Indies
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2.
The App Annie DNA Report: Rise of the Indies
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Market Concentration Basics and Pain Points
3. Market Concentration in the Mobile Gaming Industry
● Mobile Gaming’s Global Fragmentation
● Western Markets More Fragmented Than Asia
4. Conclusion
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3.
The App Annie DNA Report: Rise of the Indies
1. Introduction
Have you ever wondered if the mobile gaming industry is becoming more conducive or more
challenging for new companies? Or which regional markets are easier for a startup game
developer to target? This has always been difficult to ascertain because competition is a
function of the market power wielded by companies, yet most companies distribute apps
through numerous subsidiaries, which can be time­consuming to combine manually from app
store data.
Using ​App Annie DNA​, this report aims to paint an accurate picture of competition and market
concentration in the mobile gaming space by answering the following questions:
● How has the worldwide distribution of downloads and revenues across companies
changed over the past year and what does this mean for the future of the industry?
● Which key countries present the easiest market entry opportunities and which ones are
completely dominated by market leaders?
● Which countries are becoming more favorable for startups and which ones are
consolidating further?
A granular understanding of competition and market concentration holds value for both app
publishers and investors. App publishers can use market concentration to identify markets
which they can enter directly and those where a partnered approach may work better.
Meanwhile, investors can use it to understand when an industry is ripe for consolidation or
simply use it as an input when evaluating investments or exits.
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4.
The App Annie DNA Report: Rise of the Indies
2. Market Concentration Basics and
Pain Points
Market concentration is a function of the distribution of market share among companies in an
industry. A few firms hold dominant market share positions in highly concentrated industries,
while the “long tail” (combined market positions of non­leading competitors) tends to be more
pronounced in fragmented industries. While this seems easy enough to understand, it can be
challenging to get a handle on market concentration in the app economy. This is because
companies may have multiple subsidiaries and each could have multiple and independent
publisher accounts on multiple platforms. For example, Tencent has 364 apps listed under ​24
different publisher accounts on iOS and Google Play, while Electronic Arts has 939 apps listed
under ​15 different publisher accounts and split between 3 subsidiaries. It would take a
significant amount of time to identify and combine all entities related to a company.
App Annie’s ​DNA categorization model​ removes this complexity by identifying and grouping
multiple apps/publisher accounts and subsidiaries under a single parent company. As a result, it
saves significant effort and enables more accurate insight into the impact specific companies
have on competition. With access to company­level data, we can measure market concentration
by using the ​Herfindahl­Hirschmann Index (HHI)​. HHI is commonly used by investors to
estimate the likelihood of industry consolidation and by government agencies to assess the
resulting impact on competition. This is calculated by adding the squares of the market shares
of competitors in an industry ­­ a higher number signifies higher market concentration with a
thinner long tail and vice versa.
This can be illustrated with the following example: say an industry has 3 companies, A, B and C
that held market shares of 50%, 40% and 10% respectively in a year. Using the formula from
the previous paragraph, the HHI for this industry was 0.42 for the year. In the following year, if
the market share of A, B and C changes to 33% each, the industry’s HHI would drop to 0.33.
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5.
The App Annie DNA Report: Rise of the Indies
Therefore, as an industry becomes more fragmented, market share becomes more evenly
distributed and HHI declines. Pictorially, this can be shown as follows:
Higher market concentration implies lower market share for smaller competitors (thinner long
tail) and vice versa.
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