App Annie, the service that tracks downloads and rankings on the App Store, has released a new report showing how multiplayer games are important to mobile, but there’s a really interesting little data point showing world wide spending in the first quarter of 2014 and 2015 among the App Store, Google Play, and handheld systems. Let’s just say that the numbers don’t look good for handhelds like the 3DS and Vita:
Oof. From the looks of it, iOS and Android separately have grown more year-over-year than what handheld system software sales are worth in their entirety. And that excludes the ad revenue being brought in to developers. Do you see how lucrative mobile is? There’s more users, and far more money there. App Annie estimates 1.1 billion mobile devices being used for gaming, and while maybe users are spending less per user than dedicated systems, there’s a lot of money to be made, potentially.
Another interesting takeaway from this report is that multiplayer games are rather lucrative; they are about 30% of all downloads, but about 60% of all spending, and both stats have grown year-over-year. However, this data includes pretty much anything with leaderboards, like Crossy Road (Free), which seems like a uselessly-expansive definition of ‘multiplayer’ so as to render it useless. Still, social features are useful for developers, it seems.
