Like it or not, mobile gaming is a massive market and data from Superdata reveals that revenue from mobile games surpassed earnings on any other platform in 2018.

Digital revenue from games across all platforms grew 11 percent year-on-year totalling $109.8 billion.

Mobile gaming made up $61.3 billion of that figure while digital games on PC accounted for $35.7 billion and revenue from console games amounted to $12.7 billion.

It should be pointed out that this data only looks at digital sales and not physical.

More interesting than mobile gaming becoming a juggernaut is how popular and lucrative free-to-play games were in 2018.

Bizarre as it may sound, 80 percent of digital games revenue in 2018 came from free-to-play games. Asia was the biggest contributor to this with the region spending $87.7 billion on free to play games in 2018.

In terms of the top free-to-play games Fortnite is top of the pops with $2.4 billion in revenue and Dungeon Fighter Online comes in second with revenue of $1.5 billion. League of Legends lands in third with revenue of $1.4 billion.

This does not mean premium games are dead, however, but the market is changing.

Across PC and console, premium gaming brought in $17.9 billion with the biggest spenders being North America and Europe.

Superdata points out that sales of premium games, particularly on console, are moving away from physical discs and toward digital downloads.

It will be interesting to see how mobile gaming grows in 2019. Sure, it’s not for everybody but looking at the numbers, mobile gaming sure does bring in the bucks and we wouldn’t be surprised to see more developers and publishers trying to get a slice of the mobile gaming pie.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]