We spend a good chunk of our time and money on mobile gaming, a new report says.
Thanks to a report from App Annie, we can now more easily quantify the industry’s growth. According to the report, in the mobile app market, games account for a whopping 10 percent of the total time users spend in apps. That may not seem like much at first, but when you consider the fact that like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix are included, 10 percent is a pretty big number.
Regarding download figures, mobile games accounted for 33 percent of all downloaded apps in 2018. Furthermore, an astounding 74 percent of all consumer spending on mobile app stores came through video games.
Breaking that down further, only about 5 percent of that revenue came from outright buying apps the other 95 percent was from in-app purchases, proving the success of free-to-play business models like randomized loot boxes, paid XP boosts, and more.
The amount of time the average person spends in a mobile game is increasing more, as well. In 2018, the total number of hours spent playing mobile games increased from around 100 billion to roughly 130 billion.
It’s also worth looking at the age ranges of people who play mobile games. In 2018, the vast majority of mobile gamers were over 25 years old throughout most of the world China is the only exception, where the distribution of gamers aged 16-24 and those over 25 was roughly 50/50.
Mobile gaming is bigger than every other channel whether it be computers, home game consoles or handheld consoles, the report says. “In fact, it’s 20% larger than all these other channels combined.”
