According to Sensor Tower, player spending in action genre mobile games reached $966.8 million in 2021, up 68.9 percent from the previous year, making it the fastest-growing genre in terms of revenue last year.
The rise of mobile action games
The mobile action game genre was the fastest-growing genre after the 68.9 percent increase in player spending. The largest action subgenre for player spending was Open World Adventure, which generated more than $418.3 million, up to 3.5x year-over-year. The impact of Genshin Impact on this figure is huge. In 2021, Genshin Impact generated $406.3 million in revenue. The successful game became the leader of the action game genre with this contribution.
Marvel Contest of Champions ranked 2nd in terms of player spending, followed by Dragon Ball Legends.
The second fastest-growing genre by revenue in 2021 was hyper-casual, which increased by approximately 43 percent Y/Y to more than $111 million. Tabletop, meanwhile, ranked No. 3 for growth, with player spending rising by 35.4 percent Y/Y to $772.5 million.
Regardless of their growth rate, puzzle games generated the highest revenue this year. Puzzle games ranked first with $5.1 billion in revenue, casino games ranked second with 4.8 billion dollars, and strategy games ranked third with 4.3 billion dollars.
Download numbers drop after pandemic
During the post-pandemic normalization period, a decrease was observed in the number of downloads. After the peak in 2020, the download numbers of almost every game genre started to decrease. The game type with the smallest decrease in downloads was sports games.
In 2021, the most downloaded game genre was hyper-casual. The puzzle genre followed it with 552 million downloads and the arcade game with 438.5 million downloads.
Overall, in-game spending has increased while downloads have dropped in the US. Game downloads in the US fell 9.5 percent year on year to 4.9 billion. On the other hand, game revenues increased by 13.7 percent year on year to $25.4 billion.
