Since most popular smartphone games are available for free and don’t require a lockout to draw in a captive audience, you would have thought that the difficulty wouldn’t harm them, but it turns out that they have recently seen the same kind of drop. Despite mobile gaming’s overall popularity, most genres have suffered a drop in sales over the past year, with the market declining 9.6% year over year to $11.4 billion. The revenue decline for racing games was the most severe, plummeting 28.8% from the same time the previous year.
In the first half of 2022, the mobile gaming market shrank to $11.4 billion, according to new Sensor Tower Game Intelligence statistics. The only categories that saw a rise in income were arcade and tabletop games. The revenue from arcade games climbed 14.8% over the previous year to almost $176 million. According to AppleInsider, other genres, such as hypercasual and RPG, experienced a dip. Racing games experienced the biggest reduction in income, down 28.8% year over year, and geolocation augmented reality games suffered a drop of 26% during the same period.
However, the revenue data do not accurately represent the popularity of various genres in terms of downloads. The only genre to experience growth in downloads for 1H22 was action, which ranked seventh in terms of revenue growth year over year with a decline of 10.5% and saw a rise of 5.4% to 54.7 million. At over 66 million instals, the sports genre stayed steady.
Six genres were found to have experienced no declines when 2Q22 was examined, but other categories experienced a sharper decline when compared to the entire first half of the year. The fastest-growing genre was shooter, with instals growing by 17.5% Y/Y to 30.2 million, partly due to the release of Apex Legends Mobile by EA, which received 5.5 million downloads in 2Q22.
