What’s up with paid growth in the mobile gaming market?

What’s happening with paid growth in the mobile gaming market? It’s a question I get asked frequently, and of course, there are many ways to approach it.

I decided to examine it from a data perspective (based on data ai data). I analyzed data comparing the share of paid downloads within the total download pool for various mobile gaming segments (top 10 games worldwide by revenue, top 11-50, etc.) across different years.
Naturally, such an analysis has limitations. For instance, it is very hard for any tool to distinguish all paid downloads, and this analysis considered worldwide data (perhaps focusing on a single country, like the US, would be more insightful).

Nevertheless, even from this data, we can observe the following:
🔹 On Android, paid downloads saw strong growth from 2019 to 2021, with a significant dip in 2022, followed by a strong comeback in 2023 and high shares in 2024.
🔹 The most significant “comeback” in paid downloads occurred among the biggest games and the smallest ones.
🔹 On iOS, the 2022 dip in paid downloads was even more pronounced.
🔹 On iOS, we see very strong growth in paid downloads for the top-grossing games.
🔹 Overall, there’s been pretty strong growth in paid downloads across many game segments, despite the fluctuations.