Mobile game downloads jump 40% in three years

Mobile gaming's global dominance in downloads, sales and revenue continues, as data reveals mobile games on the Google Play store hit 8.59 billion downloads in Q4 2019.

The market is the single largest revenue source of the entire gaming industry, and downloads have been rising steadily since 2016, according to a report from Golden Gaming News.

Six billion downloads was the milestone in Q4 2016, meaning global downloads on the Google Play store have jumped 40% in three years.

Last year, the global top-grossing mobile game on the Google Play store, Roblox, surpassed USD$1 billion in lifetime revenue.

The massively multiplayer online game saw much of its popularity grow within the last three years and has been downloaded approximately 290 million times worldwide.

Emerging markets are one of the main drivers behind the boom in business for the mobile gaming industry, according to the data from Golden Gaming News.

According to the research, Brazil has seen a 40% rise in downloads in its market in the last three years.

Indonesians have downloaded 70% more mobile games since 2016, and India saw a jump of a giant 190% in downloads in three years.

China, as the leading mobile games market in the world, witnessed an 80% increase in the number of all app downloads.

There are now 2.57 million apps on Google Play, according to the research. Of that number, 350,000 are mobile games, accounting for 13.5% of the total figure.

After games, the most popular app categories by share of available apps on the Google Play store are education, business, lifestyle and entertainment.

The data also shows that the 'tools' category has remained the second most popular app category by downloads within the Google Play store, after gaming, for the last three years.

However, the gulf between the two categories is large; in 2019, there was a difference of 7.2 billion downloads between the two leading categories.

Roblox was not the only game that reached a milestone in lifetime revenue in the last 12 months.

Garena Free Fire, the second top-grossing Google play game, passed the $1 billion milestone in revenue during the last year.

The mobile battle royal shooter also saw its number of users rise to 450 million globally.

Coin Master ranked third on this Google Play list. Launched in 2010, Coin Master has reached more than 81 million downloads with an average revenue per download of $6.20.

The statistics show that in 2019 this game hit more than $500 million in global revenue.