Top grossing iOS mobile gaming apps 2020, ranked by daily revenue

Mobile gaming has become a huge industry, with successful game developers in line to generate millions from their mobile games. In March 2020, the mobile version of the popular battle royale game, Fortnite, generated daily revenue of over 423 thousand U.S. dollars from iPhone users in the United States.

The rise of Fortnite

First released in 2017, Fortnite is a battle royale game which pits up to 100 players against one another in a fight to the death. The mobile version of the game has proven to be extremely popular and has been met with critical acclaim. The app was nominated for both Mobile Game of the Year at 2018 Golden Joystick Awards and Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards 2018. It has also achieved commercial success as it grossed 455 milion U.S. dollars on the Apple App Store worldwide in 2018, amounting to a daily average revenue of 1.6 million U.S. dollars. With the number of registered Fortnite users worldwide continuing to rise, it appears that Epic Games' number one hit shows no signs of slowing down.

Online app stores

With individual gaming apps generating millions of dollars of revenue on a daily basis, it is no surprise that app stores are also raking in the revenue. In 2018, Google Play Store recorded gross revenues of 21.5 billion U.S. dollars from mobile games, up from 17.3 billion generated in 2017. The numbers for Apple's App Store were even more impressive, with revenue from mobile games on its iOS platform reaching 33.2 billion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2018. Interestingly, despite Apple's App Store leading the way in terms of revenue, Google Play recorded significantly more mobile game downloads in 2018. A total of 38.3 billion mobile games were downloaded globally across both app stores in that year, out of which the vast majority, 29.4 billion downloads in total, were attributed to Google Play.