Mobile analytics company Flurry recently released their “State of Mobile 2017” report, and it turns out total mobile gaming sessions went down 16%. This has been a trend for a few years in a row now for mobile gaming, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad news. In a previous report, Flurry Analytics acknowledged that while the total amount of gaming sessions has declined, when people do choose to spend time gaming on mobile, they are playing for longer periods of time (12% longer), with higher levels of engagement.
One possible reason for the decline in mobile gaming could be growth in other mobile categories like shopping, music, media and entertainment, or business and finance. These categories saw growth of 33% or more. These increases, combined with a “stagnating” 6% overall growth of mobile, suggest that consumers aren’t increasing how much time they spend on mobile, just how they allocate the time they already spend.
The major takeaway for app developers out of this report is that if they want to compete for the time of mobile users, they have to innovate and really engage their users. Otherwise, those users will most likely go back to their favorite apps, which they already have on their phones and tablets.
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Are you a mobile gamer? If so, we’d like to know your thoughts on this report and the state of mobile gaming. How do you allocate your time spent on mobile platforms? Let us know in the comments below!
Header Image: Santeri Viinamäki [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
