Mobile game in-app purchases reached approximately $82 billion in 2025, a 1.3% year-over-year increase. That was a third straight year of growth, even as global app downloads edged up only 0.8%. The market has stopped growing by adding new players and now grows by extracting more revenue from the ones it already has.
Key Takeaways
- Global mobile game in-app purchase revenue reached approximately $82 billion in 2025, up 1.3% year over year, according to Sensor Tower measurement of iOS and Google Play.
- Across all app categories, IAP revenue surged 10.6% to $167 billion in 2025, with total downloads at nearly 150 billion and time spent at 5.3 trillion hours (roughly 3.6 hours per day per user).
- The United States generated $2.16 billion in mobile game revenue in June 2025, a 32% share of the worldwide total, followed by China (iOS only) at 15% and Japan at 13%.
- Hybrid-casual games saw a 37% IAP revenue jump in 2024, while Casual games saw the most absolute growth.
- Strategy games account for only 4% of global mobile downloads but 21.4% of consumer spend, with 4X titles carrying the highest IAP revenue of any subgenre.
- Frontier markets led the fastest percentage IAP growth among the 23 markets Sensor Tower studied in 2024: Turkey +28%, Mexico +21%, India +17%, Thailand +16%, and Saudi Arabia +14%, while Japan fell 7%.
- Global mobile game downloads reached nearly 4.3 billion in June 2025, down 2% year over year, with India alone providing 776 million (18%).
Editor’s Choice
- Mobile game IAP grew 4% to $81 billion in 2024, up 4% year over year and reflecting the resilience of the mobile gaming market.
- Global mobile game consumer spending hit an estimated $7.27 billion in January 2025, up 4% month over month.
- In June 2025, global spending settled at approximately $6.7 billion, down 3% year over year.
- Mobile game downloads fell 6% to 49.6 billion in 2024, their lowest total since 2019.
- The United States alone contributed $52 billion in mobile IAP in 2024, more than a third of the global $150 billion total across all app categories.
- MONOPOLY GO! was the top-grossing mobile game worldwide in 2024, followed by Tencent’s Honor of Kings, the largest mid-core title on the platform.
- Time spent inside Generative AI apps reached 48 billion hours in 2025, roughly 3.6× the 2024 total, reshaping how attention flows around mobile games.
Global Mobile Games Market Size
The headline metrics for the market size sit inside four numbers:
- Total in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Google Play reached $167 billion in 2025, a 10.6% year-over-year gain.
- Gaming’s share of that total is approximately $82 billion, up 1.3% year over year, the third consecutive year of growth after the post-2021 correction.
- Total downloads edged up only 0.8% in 2025 to nearly 150 billion, while consumers spent 5.3 trillion hours in apps, about 3.6 hours per day per mobile user.
- According to Sensor Tower’s H1 2026 index, worldwide mobile IAP landed at $39.8 billion in the first half of 2026 against $40.6 billion in H1 2025, a dip of around 2% year over year, while mobile downloads fell 12% to 24 billion.
By the numbers: Games took roughly $82 billion of the $167 billion consumers spent on in-app purchases across iOS and Google Play in 2025, about 49% of the total, while in 2024 mobile game installs fell 6% to 49.6 billion against a 136 billion all-app download base in that same 2024 window.
| Metric (global, iOS + Google Play) | 2024 | 2025 | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-app IAP revenue | $150 billion | $167 billion | +10.6% |
| Mobile game IAP revenue | $81 billion | ~$82 billion | +1.3% |
| Hours per user per day | 3.5 | 3.6 | +0.1 hours |
Source: Sensor Tower State of Mobile 2025 and 2026
Mobile is the largest slice of the global games market by both revenue and player base. Growth is now a revenue-per-user story, not a headcount story.
Mobile gaming’s per-user economics increasingly resemble the wider App Store picture, where a few high-ARPU categories carry the tail. The runway now sits inside live ops, not installs.
Top-Grossing Mobile Games
The same five games filled every top-five revenue slot in January, March, May, and June 2025. No outside challenger broke the rotation, so position changes came from event calendars rather than new launches.
- January 2025: Honor of Kings jumped six positions to claim the global #1 revenue spot, followed by Royal Match at #2, Last War: Survival at #3, Whiteout Survival at #4, and MONOPOLY GO! at #5.
- March 2025: Whiteout Survival had climbed two positions to take the top slot, with Royal Match at #2, Last War: Survival at #3, MONOPOLY GO! at #4, and Honor of Kings at #5.
| Rank | Game (June 2025) | Publisher | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MONOPOLY GO! | Scopely | Casino / social |
| 2 | Last War: Survival | Not reported | 4X strategy |
| 3 | Whiteout Survival | Century Games | 4X strategy |
| 4 | Royal Match | Dream Games | Match-3 puzzle |
| 5 | Honor of Kings | Tencent | MOBA |
Source: Sensor Tower App Performance Insights, June 2025
- June 2025: MONOPOLY GO! reclaimed the #1 spot, with Last War: Survival at #2, Whiteout Survival at #3, Royal Match at #4, and Honor of Kings at #5.
| Month (2025) | #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | Honor of Kings | Royal Match | Last War: Survival | Whiteout Survival | MONOPOLY GO! |
| March | Whiteout Survival | Royal Match | Last War: Survival | MONOPOLY GO! | Honor of Kings |
| May | Honor of Kings | Whiteout Survival | Last War: Survival | Royal Match | MONOPOLY GO! |
| June | MONOPOLY GO! | Last War: Survival | Whiteout Survival | Royal Match | Honor of Kings |
Source: Sensor Tower Top 10 Worldwide Mobile Games monthly reports, January to June 2025
MONOPOLY GO! was the biggest revenue winner of 2024 overall, bringing in the most in-app purchase revenue worldwide. Scopely’s breakout hit launched in 2023 and combines the beloved MONOPOLY intellectual property with proven coin-looter gameplay.
Why it matters: Five titles traded positions 1 through 5 in January, March, May and June 2025, and the moves tracked event calendars rather than launches. Lunar New Year lifted Honor of Kings in January, and MONOPOLY GO! retook the lead in June. Retention and event cadence, not novelty, decide this chart.
The mid-core end of the chart is a Tencent story, and its dominance shows up wherever the Lunar New Year calendar hits. Honor of Kings remained the largest mid-core mobile title in the world in 2024.
Monthly Consumer Spending on Mobile Games
The monthly picture shows how event cadence, not new releases, dictates the revenue curve, and the month-to-month swings are large:
- January 2025 reached an estimated $7.27 billion in global mobile game consumer spending, a 4% month-over-month gain, with Lunar New Year events lifting Tencent’s Honor of Kings, Game For Peace, CrossFire, and Teamfight Tactics.
- March 2025 landed at roughly $6.79 billion (+5.6% month-over-month), with the United States generating $2.2 billion (31.9% of worldwide revenue).
- May 2025 climbed to approximately $6.85 billion (+5.4% month over month), with the U.S. at $2.13 billion (31% of worldwide revenue).
- June 2025 slipped to about $6.7 billion, a 3% year-over-year decline.
Key finding: Monthly spend reached $7.27 billion in January 2025, settled near $6.79 billion in March and $6.85 billion in May, then slipped to about $6.7 billion in June. Holiday and IP windows lift the curve, and the gains fade once the cadence breaks.
Recent Developments
- July 2026: Honor of Kings surged to #1 worldwide by revenue, with Pokémon GO also climbing after Pokémon GO Fest 2026: Global and its 10th Anniversary celebrations.
- Monthly spend, July 2026: consumer spending on mobile games across the App Store and Google Play reached $6.6 billion, up 7.7% month over month, while downloads reached 3.72 billion, up 2.2%.
- Pokémon GO’s June 2025 GO Fest pushed the game to #8 in absolute worldwide revenue and #1 in monthly revenue growth, driven by the debut of the Mythical Pokémon Volcanion, increased shiny odds, and exclusive raids after in-person events in Japan and the United States.
- Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, Cygames’ reboot of the original card battler, debuted at #4 in June 2025 revenue growth; its launch bundled a free Legendary starter deck with a guaranteed Legendary every 10 packs purchased, driving spending in Japan and the US.
- Sensor Tower acquired Playliner, a Live Ops intelligence platform providing insights into event cadence and monetization tactics across top mobile games.
- State of Mobile 2026 (January 2026): Generative AI mobile app IAP nearly tripled year over year in 2025 to exceed $5 billion, with downloads doubling to 3.8 billion and time spent reaching 48 billion hours (about 3.6× the 2024 total).
- Honor of Kings held #1 worldwide in May 2025, with its Five-Five Friends Festival coinciding with an important holiday period in China and helping solidify that leadership throughout May.
Downloads and Country Split
Downloads and revenue lead from different geographies:
- Global mobile game downloads reached nearly 4.3 billion in June 2025, a 2% year-over-year decline, with India dominating at 776 million (18%) of the global total, followed by the United States at 7.1% and Indonesia at 6.4%.
| Rank | Game (June 2025 downloads) | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Block Blast! | Not reported |
| 2 | Free Fire | Garena |
| 3 | ROBLOX | Not reported |
| 4 | Subway Surfers | Not reported |
| 5 | Pizza Ready! | Not reported |
Source: Sensor Tower App Performance Insights, June 2025
Garena Free Fire alone added over 37.1 million downloads in January 2025, pushing its lifetime total to approximately 1.86 billion. India accounted for 34.8% of those new downloads, Indonesia 22.2%, and Brazil 6.4%. Block Blast! was the most-downloaded mobile game globally in March 2025 and again in June 2025. It had amassed approximately 455 million downloads since its March 2022 launch.
The gap between the revenue leaderboard and the download leaderboard is the entire story of monetization in mobile. Android share in emerging markets drives install volume, while iOS spending in the US and Japan drives the revenue total.
2024 Regional Growth in Mobile Game Spending
Regional cuts show where the next wave of paying users lives, and the fastest-growing markets sit well outside the traditional revenue centres:
- In 2024, North America saw a 9% year-over-year increase in mobile game IAP and Europe saw a 14% increase, while Asia declined 3%, the only major region to fall.
- Latin America was up 13% and the Middle East up 18% in 2024.
The regional and remaining-country breakdown follows:
| Region / market (2024) | IAP revenue YoY change |
|---|---|
| Middle East (region) | +18% |
| Europe (region) | +14% |
| Latin America (region) | +13% |
| North America (region) | +9% |
| Oceania (region) | +8% |
| Asia (region) | -3% |
| Japan | -7% |
Source: Sensor Tower State of Mobile Gaming 2025; State of Mobile Gaming (Genres and Regions)
The country-level cuts sharpen that regional picture:
- Among the 23 markets studied, Turkey led with 28% IAP growth, followed by Mexico at 21%, India at 17%, Thailand at 16%, and Saudi Arabia at 14%. Japan fell 7% in spend.
- On the downloads side, Saudi Arabia was up 5%, one of the few markets to grow installs in 2024, alongside Indonesia.
The frontier-market list overlaps with the fastest 5G rollout footprint.
Genre Economics: Where the Money Actually Comes From
Genre performance on mobile is now a monetization story dressed up as a taxonomy, and install share tells you almost nothing about spend:
- Strategy games account for only 4% of global mobile game downloads but 21.4% of consumer spend; within Strategy, 4X titles carry the highest IAP revenue of any subgenre.
| Genre | Share of downloads (2024) | Share of consumer spend (2024) | Reported revenue direction (2024) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy | 4% | 21.4% | Not reported |
| Puzzle | Not reported | Not reported | +14% revenue, downloads fell 3% |
| Hybridcasual | Not reported | Not reported | +37% IAP revenue YoY |
| Casual | Not reported | Not reported | Most absolute IAP growth of any genre |
| Mid-core (MOBA / RPG) | Not reported | Not reported | Honor of Kings largest mid-core title |
Source: Sensor Tower State of Mobile Gaming 2025; State of Mobile Gaming (Genres and Regions)
- Puzzle games saw a 3% decline in downloads in 2024 paired with a 14% climb in IAP revenue, echoing the Strategy pattern of narrower audiences paying more per player.
- Hybrid-casual games posted a 37% year-over-year IAP revenue jump in 2024, a genre that blends hypercasual mechanics with mid-core meta-progression.
For publishers, the takeaway is direct: retention and ARPU beat raw install volume. The Subscription-based monetization models that reshaped streaming and productivity apps are now the fastest-growing revenue lever inside mobile games, alongside battle passes and time-limited events.
Time Spent, Sessions, and the Attention Fight
Even as install growth stalled, the underlying engagement metrics rose:
- Mobile gaming time spent grew 8% year over year in 2024, and sessions grew 12%, even as downloads fell 6% to 49.6 billion.
The single loudest attention competitor is Generative AI. Time spent in Generative AI apps hit 48 billion hours in 2025, roughly 3.6× the 2024 figure and nearly 10× the 2023 level. Session volume passed one trillion for the year. Mobile game publishers are competing for that same evening hour on a smartphone’s screen. Live-ops depth and IP crossovers have become their primary defensive lever against Generative-AI attention drift.
How much do mobile gamers spend per month?
Aggregate monthly spending is easier to state than per-player ARPU because publishers report the former and rarely the latter. Global mobile-game consumer spending across the App Store and Google Play reached approximately $6.7 billion in June 2025, a 3% year-over-year dip. Real ARPU sits in a small paying-user tail, and most players spend nothing at all. The headline aggregates therefore dwarf what any average player contributes.
Which country spends the most on mobile games?
The United States is the largest single revenue market, and the gap is widening. In June 2025, the US contributed $2.16 billion in mobile game consumer spending, 32% of the worldwide total. China (iOS only) followed at 15% and Japan at 13%.
Across all app categories in 2025, US consumers spent nearly $60 billion, the largest national mobile market by revenue. The China share is iOS-only, so the true China figure is higher.
Are mobile game downloads still growing?
Mobile game downloads are essentially flat, and the direction depends on the window. Full-year 2024 mobile game downloads reached 49.6 billion, a 6% decline from 2023 and their lowest total since 2019. June 2025 downloads were nearly 4.3 billion, a 2% year-over-year decline. Developed-region installs have plateaued while India carries the global total, a curve familiar from social media.
Conclusion
Mobile game IAP held around the $82 billion band in 2025, up 1.3% year over year and a third straight year of growth. US-led revenue concentration persisted through June 2025, with the US at 32% of worldwide mobile game spend and China (iOS) and Japan trailing. The next 12 months are a story of frontier markets and account-drain risk; the phishing-scams perimeter matters as spending concentrates.
