IOS APP Store Data Report: Game Makers With an Annual Revenue of Less Than $1 Million Contribute to Only 2% of the Total Revenue

Sensor Tower’s monitoring data shows that for game makers with less than $1 million revenue on APP Store in 2020, their total revenue account for only 2% of that of game APPs in APP Store.

Apple recently announced that it will reduce the commission fee of developers with less than $1 million annual revenue by 50%. Under the new policy, those developers will receive 85% of their revenue, while the commission fee for those with over $1 million revenue will remain at 70%.

Revenue Structure

From January 1st to October 31st, 2020, Sensor Tower surveyed near 29,000 developers who has at least one profitable game. Among those, 940 (3.3% of all developers) leading developers with $38.4 billion revenue accounted for 98% of the APP Store’s total game APPs revenue.

By comparison, nearly 28,000 developers (96.7% of all) have less than $1 million revenue in 2020. With a total of $834 million in revenue, they only account for 2% of total game APP revenue.

If further divided by annual revenue, game makers with less than $1,000 revenue take up about 50%; those with less than $10,000 revenue are 23%. Generally speaking, those with less than $100,000 annual revenue account for 89.8%, but their total revenue is only 0.5% of the total game revenue.

At the same time, the proportion of developers with $1-1.5 million revenue is only 0.6%, accounting for 0.5% of total revenue. Those with revenues of or above $1.5 million take up 2.7%, but their spending is $38.2 billion, accounting for 97.4% of their income. In fact, the proportion of annual revenue of these top developers have been increasing in recent years, standing at 96.4% in 2018 and 97.1% in 2019.

Over the past few years, the issue of “rich-poor divide” among game makers has become increasingly serious. For the whose manufacturers with less than $1 million annual revenue, their proportion of revenue has also been declining.