Apps now generate more revenue than games, according to Sensor Tower.

I recall talking about it during internal meetings at Unity in 2022, and finally, it happened:

Apps now generate more revenue than games, according to Sensor Tower.

Here are a few “why’s”

1) Gaming industry is flattening. Insane competition, tiny % of users that make all the revenue and tremendous battle to acquire them, less investments coming from VCs. Very high costs to ship something to production – the quality bar is insane.

2) Non-gaming represents a much smaller investment to get to the market and a much more predictable revenue stream, coming mostly from subscriptions that are easy to predict compared to ever increasing complexity of LTV modeling for games

3) Non-gaming apps combine not only ads and subscriptions, but IAPs too. We at Lumora introduced subscription + IAP monetization model in one of our apps in 2023 and it was very novel back then. Now, more and more apps utilize IAP approach along their subscription model, boosting the LTVs

4) And don’t forget, Sensortower sees only revenue coming from mobile that is a tiny fraction of what non-gaming apps make via web funnels. Trust me, if web revenue were included in the graph, the actual revenue from apps surpassed gaming years ago – and that was exactly my point in 2022 when I was advocating for introducing web campaigns to Unity Ads.

5) I forecast that non-gaming apps will continue to generate more revenue than games, with a growing adoption of subscription based models in general – just think how much out of your pocket you pay for subscriptions vs. games. There’s clearly a large room for subscriptions to win more out of your pocket and if you’re playing games you’re likely spending at your ceiling already.