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Games account for 75% of App Store spending

66 per cent of iOS games spending comes from APAC territories alone

Games generate an overwhelming majority of revenue on the App Store despite accounting for only one third of global downloads.

Breaking down the last ten years of the iOS App Store, market intelligence firm App Annie revealed that games represented 75 per cent of consumer spend, but only 31 per cent of downloads.

Global spend on iOS games in 2017 was $31.9 billion; APAC territories alone accounted for $21.1 billion of this, followed by the Americas with $7.5 billion, and EMEA with $3.3 billion.

Games however accounted for only 9.4 billion of the 30.5 billion worldwide downloads in 2017.

Despite this, 77 per cent of the 4.5 million apps released on iOS last year were games; this percentage has been slowly declining since 2010 when it was around 90 per cent.

Although the App Store has seen a steady decline in its share of worldwide downloads compared to Google Play -- down from 54 per cent in 2012 to 30 per cent in 2017 -- it's holds a disproportionately high share of consumer spend.

Having stabilized from its peak of 86 per cent in 2012, consumer spend on the App Store now represents 66 per cent of worldwide mobile spend.

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Ivy Taylor avatar
Ivy Taylor: Ivy joined GamesIndustry.biz in 2017 having previously worked as a regional journalist, and a political campaigns manager before that. They are also one of the UK's foremost Sonic the Hedgehog apologists.
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