Mobile games consumer spending fell 7.1 per cent year-over-year to $21 billion in Q1 2022, according to Sensor Tower.
Both the App Store and Google Play witnessed a decline in quarterly revenue in comparison to the previous year.
App Store mobile games generated $12.9 billion in consumer spending, a decrease of 2.3 per cent year-over-year, whereas mobile games on Google Play generated $8.1 billion, a fall of 13.8 per cent year-over-year.
The highest grossing mobile games for the period were Honor of Kings at $735.4 million, followed by PUBG Mobile at $643 million, and Genshin Impact at $551 million in consumer spending. These three games were also the highest grossing games on the App Store.
In comparison, the highest grossing games on Google Play were Lineage W, followed by Coin Master and Candy Crush Saga.
Spending down, installs up
Despite the decline in revenue, worldwide mobile game downloads increased 2.1 per cent year-over-year for the quarter, reaching 14.4 billion.
The downloads jump was spurred by Google Play which saw first-time mobile game instals increase 2.5 per cent to 12.1 billion. Apple Store downloads stayed flat at 2.3 billion instals for the period.
Free Fire was the most downloaded game globally with 71.2 million downloads across the App Store and Google Play. Subway Surfers followed in second place with 66.4 million and Merge Master – Dinosaur Fusion placed third with 49.4 million downloads.
Goldfinch Studio’s Wordle was the second most downloaded game on the App Store for the quarter, with the 2016 title benefitting from the success of the recently launched web-based game of the same name. The ‘wrong’ Wordle has seen a huge spike in downloads this year leading the company to recently implement the first updates since 2016, including bug fixes and new monetisation strategies.
