Flurry: Mobile gamers spend less time playing but more money

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Flurry, a mobile application data analysis company under Yahoo, recently released a new report. According to the report, compared with 2014, the proportion of time spent playing games on mobile devices by global users this year has decreased. In 2014, playing games accounted for 32% of the total time users spent on mobile devices, but this year the proportion has dropped to only 15%; in 2014, the average daily mobile game time of users was 52 minutes, but this year it has dropped to 33 minutes, a decrease of 37%.

"Gaming is a hit-driven industry, but there haven't been any new mega-hit games in the last 6-9 months," Simon Khalaf, senior vice president of product publishing at Yahoo, wrote in a blog post. "Mainstream hits like Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, and Game of War: Age of Fire continue to dominate the top grossing charts, making it difficult for new games to break in."

On the other hand, after the success of best-selling games such as Clash of Clans, many other development teams have followed suit, exacerbating the homogeneity of mobile game products. Another trend is that more and more users seem to prefer spending more money on F2P games to reduce the time they spend playing games.

"In mobile games, players are more willing to spend money rather than time," said Khalaf. "Players spend money (rather than time) to complete the game, or to get a higher ranking on the in-game leaderboard, rather than improving their ranking through their own efforts." As a result, players are spending less and less time playing mobile games, but developers are earning more and more. "This also explains why players are spending less time playing games and why IAP has become popular. In July of this year, the total sales of apps on Apple's AppStore reached a record high of $1.7 billion."

Flurry also pointed out in the report that in addition to playing games themselves, more and more players are willing to watch others play games.