Marketing mobile games is dead. ‘Probabilistically’

By any measure of value, audience size, or growth, mobile is the dominant form of gaming media. Already immensely popular due to its accessibility and wide range of content, the COVID-19 pandemic created hundreds of millions of new mobile players and increased the playtime and appetite to spend of existing gamers. With over a billion weekly game downloads on the Apple App Store and Google Play, resulting in more than $1.7 billion in weekly spend, the mobile game industry is clearly booming.

It’s also super top-heavy, fueled by the significant revenue of a few thousand games; chief among them smash hits such as PUBG Mobile, Coin Master, and Candy Crush. As of August, seven mobile games that pull in over $100 million in an average month. Another 810 gross at least $1 million monthly. These figures are astounding and a testament to world-class game development, intelligent marketing, the virality of quality gaming content, and a little sprinkle of magic dust for luck. Dig a little deeper into the two dominant mobile stores and you’ll see that between them they house around 1.5 million games. Some basic math would suggest that well under 1% of the available games are making approximately a quarter of the revenue.