The days of playing microscopic versions of Tetris and Pac-Man on one's flip-phone are long gone, as mobile gaming has created a league of its own, sometimes even competing with console and PC gaming. Some of the industry's most popular games like Genshin Impact and Fortnite eventually found their way over to mobile devices, and mobile hits like Pokemon GO and Clash of Clans have solidified the platform's space in the industry.
While much of the discourse surrounding mobile gaming today focuses on Epic Games' legal battle with Apple, something that may have slipped past most mobile gamers is that the file sizes of mobile games have increased exponentially in recent years. Data recently released by mobile analyst Sensor Tower has shown significant file size increases for the top 100 most popular iOS games since 2016.
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According to Sensor Tower's data, iOS games have seen a 76% increase in file size when compared to 5 years ago. Additionally, iOS games have experienced an average 30.3% increase in file size in just the past year, as shown below. By far, the mobile game with the biggest change in file size from 2019 to 2020 was the DoubleDown casino slots game, with a 106.9% increase. Fortnite also experienced a significant file size increase, despite no longer being available on the iOS App Store at the moment.
Of course, this all goes without saying that the storage capabilities of iOS devices, and mobile devices in general, has greatly increased in recent years. For example, 2016's iPhone 7 could be purchased with a size of 32GB, which is no longer an option with last year's iPhone 12, which comes with a baseline storage size of 64GB.
According to Sensor Tower, the average mobile game was about 264 megabytes in 2016, while it is around 465 megabytes in 2020. Roblox has been all the rage among young gamers recently, making it the top-grossing game on the iOS App Store last year. The popular game creation platform saw a 20% increase in file size in just the past year alone, and a 73% increase since 2016.
Sensor Tower also revealed that overall, the game with the largest file size increase since 2016 was Zynga and NaturalMotion's CSR Racing 2, which jumped 123.3% since 2016 to a whopping 3.8 gigabytes. Additionally, Supercell's massively popular Clash of Clans saw a 36.5% increase in file size just from 2019 to 2020.
Just the other day, Amazon launched its GameOn platform on iOS, combining elements of Twitch and TikTok focused on capturing, editing, and sharing mobile gaming content. Now, as AAA experiences like PUBG Mobile, Genshin Impact, and Call of Duty: Mobile have become mainstays in the mobile gaming industry, it will be interesting to see how the landscape of the platform changes in the future.
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Source: Sensor Tower