Last year, the number of downloads of games in the Russian Google Play and App Store increased by 4% to almost 3 billion. This is reported by Vedomosti with reference to the data of the analytical platform data.ai .
Gacha Life 2
Downloads of strategy games (+22%), hyper-casual games (+11%) and puzzles (+7%) increased the most in Russia. Also in 2023, downloads of games in the match-3 subgenre rose (+12%), — as Vedomosti writes, Russians began to download them more actively against the background of the growing popularity of Turkish titles (probably Royal Match) and the appearance of new games from Asian studios.
The most downloaded game in Russia in 2023 was Roblox — it has 10 million downloads. The second place was taken by Lunime's Gacha Life 2, released in September 2023, in which users can shoot anime videos with characters they created. Russians have downloaded it 9.36 million times.
In data.ai This time, Russians' spending on mobile games has not been calculated. In a comment to Vedomosti, a representative of the platform said that since February 2022, it has become difficult to analyze them. "Some of the players located in Russia have transferred their accounts, linking them to the app stores of neighboring countries — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia and others where there are no restrictions. As a result, we can see revenue growth in these countries, but not in Russia," he explained.
Recall that in 2022, the App Store and Google Play stopped accepting payments from Russian users. As a result, by the end of that year, Russians' spending on mobile games fell threefold — from $1.05 billion in 2021 to $343 million in 2022.
Previously, analysts from data.ai It was reported that in 2023, global user spending on mobile games decreased by 2% to $107.3 billion. Downloads also fell slightly and amounted to 87.9 billion.