The most downloadable game during the first quarter was Kiloo’s Subway Surfers. The game was developed in equal parts by two Danish startups: Kiloo and SYBO games, with SYBO standing for the graphics and the concept, and Kiloo for the shop and social parts. Subway Surfers was first released in May 2012. Since that, it has made a huge step and finally topped the overall download charts.
In terms of revenue, during the first quarter, Mixi’s Monster Strike continued to dominate the revenue charts. Especially well the game is performing in Japan. While last year’s ‘troublemakers’: Pokémon Go and Super Mario Run showed signs of decline in terms of downloads and revenue. Type-Moon’s Fate/Grand Order, mobile game from Japan, increased its positions in revenue charts in the first quarter. Thus, it reached the second place on Google Play and appeared in top five on the App Store.
According to Sensor Tower Store Intelligence mobile game revenue from iOS and Google Play stores grew 53 percent in the first quarter and reached $11.9 billion. At the same time, Google Play revenues are growing faster than Apple’s with 83 percent versus 35 percent respectably.
As Ruika Lin, mobile insights analyst at Sensor Tower states:
“Apple app store revenue grew 35 percent to $6.6 billion from $4.9 billion in the first quarter, compared to the same period a year earlier. Google Play revenue grew 83 percent in Q1 to $5.3 billion from $2.9 billion a year earlier.”
On both stores in the first quarter of 2017 mobile game installs went as high as 15 percent compared with the same period of the previous year: to $8.8 billion from $7.6 billion.
In general, in terms of monetization, mobile games continue to dominate worldwide for all apps. As for the first quarter, they generated up to 80 percent of the gross revenue of Apple’s App Store. When it comes to Google Play the figures are even more impressive with about 91 percent of Google Play revenue.
