Average U.S. mobile game spending reaches a new high - report

Average U.S. consumer spending on mobile games reached a new high of $12 during April, although the mobile space saw a slight decline in spending for the first time in half a year. According to data from metrics tracking firm SuperData, this drop in mobile game spending, as well as spending declines across the majority of digital video game sectors, caused the digital games market to contract by nearly 5 percent month-over-month, down to $832 million in total sales across all categories. The social games decline slowed down slightly, but not by much -- the space lost an estimated 2.7 million monthly active users during April, and saw around $120 million in revenues. Free-to-play MMOs continued to beat down pay-to-play MMOs during April. Overall MMO subscriptions dropped by around 896,000 subscribers in the last three months, while free-to-play MMOs continued to show healthy growth, with around 46 million U.S. consumers now playing them. Notably, pay-to-play MMOs actually saw an increase in spending on in-game purchases, leading to overall revenues of $82 million during April, while free-to-play MMO players spent less on average month-over-month. As for download games on PC and consoles, the DLC market contracted during April down to $291 million, while the overall console space was down too. SuperData believes that anticipation for the next generation of consoles later this year is driving this decline. However, the PC download market was the only digital segment that was up in April -- digital PC games saw an increase of 9 percent month-over-month to $136 million.