UPDATED 17:43 EDT / AUGUST 28 2015

NEWS

People aren’t playing mobile games as much as they used to, says Flurry Analytics

While the mobile device market may be reaching the saturation point where even two-year-olds know how to swipe right, the way people use their smartphones and tablets is still constantly evolving. Mobile gaming may have led the charge in the early days of smartphones, but not it seems that people are spending quite as much time slicing fruit or hurling birds to their death as they used to.

According to a recent study by Flurry Analytics, Americans now spend only 15 percent of their smartphone or tablet usage playing mobile games. This is a dramatic drop from the 32 percent found in last year’s study. Flurry attributes this drop to both a lack of strong new hits over the last year, as well as the tendency for many millennials to spend their time watching other people play games through service like Twitch rather than playing the games themselves.

Flurry also pointed to an increase in users willing to pay for in-app purchases in games rather than spending time earning those rewards over time.

“Gamers are buying their way into games versus grinding their way through them,” Flurry said in its report. “Gamers are spending more money than time to effectively beat games or secure better standings rather than working their way to the top. This explains the decline in time spent and the major rise in in-app purchases, as Apple saw a record $1.7 billion in AppStore sales in July.”

So if mobile users are playing games 37 percent less than they did last year, what are they doing instead? According to Flurry, a lot of that time has gone into other forms of media entertainment such as YouTube, which saw an 8 percent increase in usage time. Social media apps also seem to be a big winner this year, and Flurry notes that a large portion of the time users spend using apps like Facebook may also be to view media.

“A study by Millward Brown Digital showed that 70 percent of social app users are actually consuming media,” Flurry said. “While we can’t correlate the 70 percent directly to time spent, we firmly believe that media consumption, either articles read in the web view in app, or video consumed in the feeds, constitute the majority of time spent in social apps.”

Photo by IntelFreePress 

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