US, Japan, Korea Drive about 80% of Google Play’s Games Revenue

At the Casual Connect conference on Wednesday, Junde Yu (App Annie’s vice president of APAC) presented a deck filled with tasty data on mobile games. One interesting fact gathered by App Annie is that 80 percent of all games revenue on Google Play is generated from US, Japan, and Korea. Junde noted in his keynote that Japan and Korea’s combined game revenue is higher than the rest of the world’s game revenue on Google Play.

China, which is crowded with numerous third-party Android app stores, isn’t generating any game revenue on Google Play since its payment system doesn’t work there. iOS game revenue in China looks healthy, though. Junde said that iOS 6, which is packed with Chinese features, has encouraged many Chinese iOS users to update its devices and in process lose their jailbreak which causes revenue on iTunes to increase.

In Japan, though, the iOS news was less impressive; game revenue from iPad isn’t great, which came to many as a surprise. In fact, only the US generates huge revenue from games on iPad.

In terms of revenue per download, no one is even near Japan’s figures which recorded $1.83 and $1.89 on iOS Games and Google Play respectively. Junde suspects that Singapore’s high iOS revenue per download figure was encouraged by the nation’s recent addiction to the game Candy Crush.

The top publishers based on game revenue on both iOS and Google Play include a number of Asian game publishers including Gungho, NHN, WeMade, GREE, and DeNA. Interestingly, Japan’s Gungho only has eight and nine applications on iOS and Android respectively, but is doing better in terms of revenue compared to GREE and DeNA, which both have hundreds of applications published on both platforms.