Games in the App Store are getting bigger. An average of 76% bigger over the past five years to be precise. That’s according to a new report from app analytics platform Sensor Tower.
The firm recently analyzed the average file size of the top 100 revenue-generating mobile games on the U.S. App Store for each year since 2016. This includes only the file size of the original download, and not any additional content.
Their report notes that:
“The average game file size in 2016 stood at approximately 264 megabytes, and has increased by 76 percent over the last five years to nearly 465 MB in 2020. Last year saw a particularly significant yearly rise, growing by 30.3 percent year-over-year. The median, meanwhile, has risen by 102.6 percent over the last five years from about 147 MB in 2016 to almost 299 MB in 2020. Last year saw a rise of 18.7 percent Y/Y, which was slower than seen in previous years.”
Last year’s top-grossing game in the App Store was Roblox, which has a file size of 222MB. However, the title with the largest file size was CSR Racing 2, which takes up a whopping 3.8 gigabytes of mobile storage.
Photo: Sensor Tower
iPhone games are getting ever bigger
The fact that games would steadily grow larger is not an enormous shocker. The 2020-era iPhone 12 Pro Max tops out at 512GB. By comparison, 2016’s iPhone 7 topped out at 256GB. Like the old myth about koi growing to fit the size of their pond, it makes sense that developers would expand the size of their titles to fit whatever storage options are available. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean bigger games, but rather larger assets to look good on the ever-increasing size of the iPhone, while taking advantage of the new processing capabilities.
Still, 76% bigger in five years is quite the jump…
Source: Sensor Tower
