Americans spent almost 7 billion hours playing mobile games in 2018

People in the US spent almost 7 billion hours playing on mobile devices in 2018.

According to new research by Unity Technologies (which means these statistics only reflect games that are using Unity Analytics, and from those, only developers that have opted to share their data), Americans invested 6.9 billion hours in mobile gaming, which averages out to be 21 hours and six minutes for every person in the country. Chicago-ians were most keen – they spent about 131 million hours playing mobiles games – followed by Houston with 97.4 million hours, Los Angeles: with 94.5 million hours, Dallas stands at 78.6 million hours, and Brooklynites come in fifth with 71.6 million hours.

Interestingly, Unity reports Brooklyn was the only region to have bucked a this year’s trend and does not include a paint-by-numbers app in their most played games, whilst Dallas gamers spent 58 hours playing mobile games per citizen in 2018 – more than twice the national average.

As for which games were the most popular? Helpfully, Unity has put together a handy chart of its most popular games:

1. Happy Color – Color by Number
2. Panda Pop
3. New YAHTZEE With Buddies
4. Cashman Casino
5. Pixel Art: Color by Number
6. War Robots
7. Word Crossy
8. Solitaire TriPeaks
9. FarmVille 2: Country Escape
10. Best Fiends
11. Zynga Poker
12. The Wizard of Oz: Magic Match 3
13. Hearthstone
14. Helix Jump
15. Merge Dragons
16. SimCity BuildIt
17. Duolingo
18. Idle Miner Tycoon
19. Sims 3 Deluxe
20. Design Home

As big as 6.9 billion hours sounds, however, don’t forget the actual figure spent on all mobile games in the United States is likely to be much bigger.

The global gaming industry is thought to have generated $134.9 billion by the end of 2018. According to market analysts, that’s a 10.9 per cent increase over 2017. 47 per cent of the industry’s revenue is from mobile gaming – that’s up 12.8 per cent on last year, hitting $63.2 billion – and while smartphones hold the biggest share of that at $50 billion (up 14.2 per cent), tablet use is on the rise too, up 7.8 per cent from last year to reach $11.4bn.

The top mobile game by the number of downloads is Helix Jump with 328 million, but the most profitable was Monster Strike, which generated $691 million. Voodoo generated the highest number of downloads from a single publisher.

The overall total industry consumer spending on video gaming in the US has reached $9.1 billion in the third quarter of 2018, a year-over-year increase of 24 per cent.