Women spend most time on mobile gaming – Mobile gaming industry has grown 57% during the pandemic – Role-playing gamers are the biggest spenders

Hamburg, December 6, 2021 – With screen times at an all-time high during the pandemic and 24% of global population playing mobile games in 2021, mobile games specialist adjoe and data-powerhouse Statista give insights into the world of mobile gaming with the Mobile Games Index. A market that is estimated to be worth roughly 250 billion Dollars in 2021, a number that increased by nearly 60% since 2019 mobile games make up two thirds of all gaming platform revenue. The Mobile Games Index gives a comprehensive look at the mobile gaming landscape and highlights the apps that captivate the most users.

The Mobile Games Index ranks Android gaming apps with the highest number of installations according to adjoe first-party data, by the amount of time users spend playing these games daily. The games are broken down into five genres and global regions, analyzing play times in relation to age as well as gender. The genres are hyper-casual, casual, midcore, hardcore and, social casino games.

Overall, women spend the most time on mobile gaming. Except for hardcore games, women engage the longest with hyper-casual, causal, midcore and social casino games. They spend 25 minutes on average on casual games, 25% more time than their male peers, who clock in at 20 minutes. These figures make casual mobile games the most successful category, with on average 50% longer playing times. Hyper-casual games capture gamers for the shortest time overall. The playtime is on average 7.4 minutes, 45% less time per day than the average mobile games playtime.

Role-Playing gamers are the biggest spenders. Role-playing games, which are part of the hardcore games category, is the highest earning game category, accounting for 31% of all mobile gaming revenue. Across all categories, most of the revenue is generated through in-app purchases (53%) and in-app advertising (46%), while only 1% comes from paid mobile games.

Some of the most successful games are Lion Studios' “Save the Girl” and Socialpoint's “Dragon City”, which have top 5 placements in the charts in each of the five regions for their corresponding app category. China presents the biggest growth opportunity for games. When looking at mobile game revenue, China is currently leading with 90 million USD and 58 billion downloads. Interestingly, while the U.S. ranks second in terms of mobile game revenue (129m USD), its number of downloads is comparatively low at just 7.2 billion. In terms of gender, male gamers (53%) are more prevalent than female players (47%), while we see the highest concentration (34%) of gamers in the 25-34 age group.

Methodology: The index ranks the Android gaming apps with the highest number of installations according to adjoe first party-data and then ranks them by the amount of time users spend playing these games on a daily basis. The index has been created using adjoe’s first-party Android device data tracked by the adjoe SDK. As a result of the SDK’s user opt-in, adjoe has insights into a user’s complete device logs, including the apps they have installed and the amount of time spent on each one. This data is aggregated and generalized by both app and user to create adjoe’s Time Spent ranking.

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About adjoe

adjoe is a leading mobile platform developing cutting-edge advertising and monetization solutions that take their app partners’ business to the next level.

About Statista

Your platform for lightspeed research. Statista is a leading provider of market and consumer data that aggregates data from partnerships and external sources while providing self-sourced content.