7.6 million people play mobile shooters every day — more than arcade games or hyper-casual titles

Sensor Tower analysts in a recent study looked at how things were with mobile engagement in the first half of the year. It turned out that although the most gamers play hyper—casual titles every month, mobile shooters have the largest daily audience.

Key findings:

• games are one of the most popular mobile apps. In the first quarter of 2021, the MAU of hundreds of top projects averaged 94.1 million people. Only various utilities had more (95.2 million). For comparison, last year the average MAU of top games was slightly less than 80 million people;
• as for DAU, an average of 13.1 million people visited the best games every day;

• hyper-casual games were the leaders in terms of both monthly and weekly audience. In the top 50 titles, the average MAU was 77.4 million people, and the WAU was 25.7 million people;
• there were more daily active users in shooters — 7.6 million people;
• also, the top three audience leaders included arcades with a MAU of 60.1 million players, a WAU of 21.8 million players and a DAU of 6.7 million players;

• separately, analysts stressed that the monthly audience of shooters is growing faster than the rest of the game categories. The top 50 shooters have a cumulative average annual growth rate of 39.2% (for comparison, it was 37.8% for hyper-casuals). In many ways, we should thank the success of PUBG Mobile and Free Fire for this. However, Sensor Tower fears that due to China’s policy towards video games, project indicators may fall, followed by indicators of the entire category of shooters;

• On average, in the second quarter of 2021, iOS users spent 21.9 minutes a day playing games. Gamers on Android a little less — for 20 minutes;

• but if you look at specific categories of games, the average time increases. Most of all iOS users played strategy (62 minutes a day) and RPG (56.8 minutes a day). They also spent a lot of time on shooters (41.6 minutes), puzzles (29.2 minutes) and hyper-casuals (11 minutes);

• on Android, the picture is similar. Gamers spent 55.7 minutes on strategy, 50.8 minutes on RPG, 25.1 minutes on puzzles, 24.7 minutes on shooters and 10.1 minutes on hyper-casual titles;

• as noted in Sensor Tower, there is a direct link between how much time gamers spend playing games and the average revenue of the game per user. Thus, social casinos, RPG and strategies were among the leaders in ARPD on iOS (analysts did not share data on Android).