RPG and strategy are the two most profitable mobile genres in the first quarter of 2021

At the beginning of this year, RPG and strategy confidently overtook other mobile genres in terms of revenue. This is not the first time this has happened. Sensor Tower analysts talked about the situation with these and other game genres in the first quarter of 2021.

RAID: Shadow Legends Revenue data

• RPG earns over $4 billion quarterly starting from the second half of 2018. In the first quarter of 2021, its revenue slightly exceeded $6 billion — an increase of 17% compared to last year.
• Strategies, the second highest-grossing genre, have been steadily keeping a distance of $1.4 billion from RPG revenue for three years. This time, the revenue of the strategies amounted to about $4.2 billion, which is 27% more in annual terms.
• Puzzles, social casinos, shooters and simulators have proved themselves well. This was partly achieved due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

How did the revenue of the top mobile genres at the box office change in 2018-2021Speaking of subgenres, 4X strategies grew the fastest in revenue.

• The top six games in this category generated at least $100 million each.
• Open world adventures have become the second fastest growing subgenre, thanks to the success of Genshin Impact.

Revenue of mobile subgenres in the first quarter of 2021Download data

• Hyper—casual games became the unambiguous leader in the number of downloads – they accounted for 31% of all game downloads in the reporting period. No other genre scored more than 12%. According to analysts, installations of hyper-casual games began to grow sharply in 2018 and still continue to increase. For comparison, in the first quarter of 2021, gamers downloaded games in this genre 3.4 billion times, and at the same time in 2018 – only 757 million times.
• Three of the top six genres have decreased the volume of downloads at the beginning of 2021. Among them are arcades (-2%), puzzles (-7%) and shooters (-17%).

How did the volume of downloads of top mobile genres change in 2018-2021Five of the ten subgenres with the highest growth in downloads in the first quarter of 2021 belonged to the category of hyper-casual games: hyper-casual runners, action, simulation, puzzles and arcade games.

Downloads of mobile subgenres in the first quarter of 2021