Mobile games turn into boom-or-bust industry as spending rises


The most profitable and downloaded games for the year were almost all long-lived mobile titles – less than US$4bil (RM17.26bil) of the total US$65.7bil (RM283.46bil) spending came from games actually released in 2024. — Unsplash

Mobile gamers ramped up their spending by 4% last year even as the number of downloads and new releases fell, highlighting the narrowing of the industry to a handful of huge titles that dominate users’ time.

New hits took less time than ever to reach their first US$1mil (RM4.31mil) in revenue – 106 days – but competition from evergreen titles meant there were fewer of those standouts than before, according to Appfigures data. Only 399 new games achieved that threshold, and there were 43% fewer games released overall in 2024, the researchers said.

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