Almost all mobile game genres see a decline in revenue in the US during H1 2022

Mobile phone with 5G connection

According to Sensor Tower’s data, almost all the mobile game genres saw a considerable decline in downloads and player spending during the first six-month period of 2022 in the US. However, this isn’t really that surprising as people spend more time outside than playing games as a result of the long-gone COVID lockdowns.

The reliable data provider said it has analyzed each of the 14 main mobile game genres thoroughly and saw that besides arcade and tabletop, all the other genres experienced a decline during the first half of 2022 compared to H1 2021, of course. The data only covers the United States audience across Google Play and App Store.

Sensor Tower believes inflation, the global cost of living crisis, and IDFA headwinds take the lion’s share of the decline but notes that issues aren’t limited to these.

Racing and Shooter take big hits

Sensor Tower US H1 2022 mobile game revenues by genre stats

Despite all the setbacks, arcade games saw strong growth and grossed approximately $176 million in revenue, while experiencing a nearly 15% rise. The data at hand says Gigantic‘s Clawee was the number one arcade game during this period generating about $16.5 million in the United States, followed by Gold & Goblins from AppQuantum Publishing and Idle Mafia from Century Games.

Related: Chinese gaming revenues decline for the first time in years

Tabletop games brought in approximately $389 million in the first six months of 2022, but the growth was only about 1% year-over-year.

Per the report, the puzzle game genre is the number one revenue generator of H1 2022 with $2.3 billion, despite a fall of 8.8%, followed by casino and strategy, with $2.2 billion and $2 billion in revenue respectively.

Hyper-casual saw growth of 2.3% year-over-year

Looking at the quarterly results, however, only the hyper-casual games genre saw an increase in revenue alongside arcade games. Hyper-casual games generated nearly $30 million dollars in Q2 2022 and saw growth in revenue by 2.3%.

Related: Google’s new ad policy won’t kill hyper-casual games according to experts

All the other mobile game genres saw a considerable decrease in revenue besides the two mentioned above compared to Q2 year-over-year results only. The racing genre is once again ranked at the bottom of the chart, this time with a 38% decrease.

Hyper-casual games experienced a major decline in downloads: a 13.7% percent decrease, down to 718.2 million downloads, but it’s still the most downloaded game genre in the US.

According to Sensor Tower, the shooter genre saw the largest growth in downloads, mainly thanks to EA’s Apex Legends Mobile release, which picked up over 5.5 million downloads since it was released, while earning well over $20 million in player spending so far.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *