Data firm AppMagic has published new research showing that growth in the mobile games market is slowing down.
For 2025, revenue rose by just 0.2% year-on-year, compared to 3% in 2024, while downloads saw a 4.6% increase, versus 6.6% the year before.
AppMagic says that this indicates that “the market [is] entering a more mature and competitive phase”. Part of the reason that growth has slowed down is due to “rising saturation” and “exhaution” within markets that had, recently at least, been fueling expansion in the mobile sector.
The company says that within the Top 10 mobile games market, “growth is largely stagnating”. What growth there is appears to be due to the redistribution of installs and revenue – for example, small increases in the likes of the UK, Germany and France offsetting declines in “key Asian monetisation markets” like South Korea.
“Together, these trends point to a maturing gaming market where competition is intensifying around a relatively fixed base of users and spending, rather than broad-based market expansion,” the company said.
Strategy games are the fastest growing genre on mobile at the mobile, having seen revenue shoot up 16% and downloads rise 15% year-on-year, while casino and RPG titles saw weaker performance. The former saw revenue dip by 7.6%, while downloads plummeted 15.8%. RPG games saw revenue drop by a massive 16.6% with downloads declining 9.1%.
AppMagic data also shows that the Latin America region is at market saturation as downloads have steeply declined in many countries; Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina saw decreases of 10%, 9.8%, 8.9% and 8.4% respectively. Revenue, however, is increasing; Argentina saw a huge 33.2% increase, while Colomba rose by 23.6%.
The company also notes that AI is firmly in the world of mobile ad creation; 56% of the Top 100 grossing games have been using the technology within their marketing.
