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Mobile gaming has become a huge industry, with successful game developers in line to generate millions from their mobile games. In March 2021, Roblox was the top grossing iPhone gaming app in the United States, generating daily revenues of over 3.09 million U.S. dollars. Second-ranked Candy Crush Saga grossed approximately 2.03 million U.S. dollars per day. Pokémon GO was ranked seventh with a daily gross of more than 463,000 U.S. dollars

Pokémon GO - a global phenomenon

Pokémon GO is a massively multiplayer location-based mobile video game which uses augmented reality. The project is jointly created by The Pokémon Company and Niantic and has been available since July 2016 on the iOS and Android platforms. Just like in the video game series, the goal is to capture Pokémon and battle it out against other trainers. In 2020, Pokémon GO player spending hit 916.5 million U.S. dollars worldwide, which was the mobile app’s most profitable year since launching in 2016, when it grossed approximately 588.77 million U.S. dollars. The location-based augmented reality (AR) game involves catching, training, and battling virtual creatures (Pokémon) in real-world locations via smartphone. While the initial Pokémon craze has slowly faded, the game still enjoys growing numbers of active users around the world and in the Asia-Pacific region in particular.

Online app stores

With individual gaming apps generating millions of dollars of revenue on a daily basis, it is no surprise that app stores are also raking in the revenue. In the second quarter of 2020, Google Play Store recorded gross revenues of 7.7 billion U.S. dollars from mobile games, up from 6.9 billion generated in the previous quarter. The numbers for Apple's App Store were even more impressive, with revenue from mobile games on its iOS platform reaching 33.2 billion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2018. Interestingly, despite Apple's App Store leading the way in terms of revenue, Google Play recorded significantly more mobile game downloads in 2018. A total of 38.3 billion mobile games were downloaded globally across both app stores in that year, out of which the vast majority, 29.4 billion downloads in total, were attributed to Google Play.