iOS App Store December game sales made nearly $1 billion in revenue

If you don’t think mobile gaming is a significant part of the video game industry, then the statistics below will likely change your mind.

Unsurprisingly, December was the App Store’s biggest month for game sales, in part due to the wash of new devices sold during the holiday shopping season.

Sensor Tower, an app marketplace analytics platform, recently revealed impressive sale figures for December, amounting to nearly $1 billion USD in revenue. According to the report, this is an 18 percent increase over the $847 million the store reportedly earned in November.

The entire games category in the United States saw a total of 179 million downloads, an increase from 143 million (26 percent) over November. Worldwide, 614 million games were downloaded from the App Store in December, an increase from 510 million in November.

The most played games during the month of December were Piano Tiles, a free-to-play application featuring in-app purchases. Cut The Rope 2, Monument Valley, Temple Run 2 and Geometry Dash Meltdown ended up being the top 5 most downloaded apps in the United States over the course of December.

Free-to-play games like Clash of Clans, Game of War, Candy Crush Saga, Madden NFL, DoubleDown Casino, were the top downloaded games in the United States. Specifically, Clash of Clans earned $59.7 million USD in revenue, and Game of War brought in $31.7 million USD.

Unfortunately, Sensor Tower doesn’t release specific Canadian App Store statistics, though, both the U.S and Canadian iOS App Stores frequently feature similar app rankings with subtle differences.

If one lesson can be gleaned from Sensor Tower’s App Store analytics, it’s that free-to-play, as much as some players hate the business model, continues to be a lucrative monetization model for mobile developers.

[source]Sensor Tower[/source][via]9to5 Mac[/via]