App Annie, leading mobile data and analytics provider, released its Mobile Gaming Overview: Create A Winning Mobile Gaming Strategy and Feature Roadmap. Fueled by App Annie’s Game IQ, the report delivers invaluable market level metrics on total downloads, consumer spend and engagement.

Mobile gaming is set to surpass $120B in consumer spend by the end of 2021. In Q3 alone, consumers downloaded 14.3B new games across iOS and Google Play. A sizable 3.6B of the total downloads were Hypercasual games — making it the most successful quarter to date.

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Additionally, the report highlighted five other genres that reigned supreme:

• Runner Action – #1 downloaded sub-genre among Action games
• 4X March-Battle Strategy – #1 largest Gaming subgenre (10%) by consumer spend ($2.4B globally)
• M3-Meta Match – #1 most downloaded subgenre among Match games
• Slots – #1 largest sub-genre of casino games (6.1%) by consumer spend ($1.4B)
• Competitive Racing – #1 largest Racing subgenre by consumer spend

“Mobile gaming spend across the app stores is not slowing down,” said Lexi Sydow, Head of Insights at App Annie. “The key to creating an insanely successful mobile game is to focus on monetization, engagement and player retention.”

• Monetization was high with features like Customizable IAP Bundles and Piggy Bank.
• Features like Task System and Rewards for returning at fixed intervals throughout the day, saw an increase in engagement.
• Player retention remained high with features like Collection Mechanics and Foreshadowed Content.

“Finding out which features attract players to games and why are key to developing a winning gaming strategy in this high-growth market,” Sydow said. “App Annie built Game IQ to solve this and the report gives a walkthrough of how to use these insights to build better games.”

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