• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 2, 2019

Despite continued advances in mobile technology and game development, consumers’ love of “hyper-casual” games continues to grow.

That’s according to AppsFlyer, which shows the genre now boasts the highest number of installs on average per app in 50% of top global markets.That represents significant growth from 2018, when it held the No. 1 spot in only 20% of markets around the world.

Along with the United States, the growth can be seen across most of Europe and Latin America, as well as India and Southeast Asia.

In part, the growth can be attributed to game makers’ eagerness to keep pumping out new game titles.

In fact, the number of hyper-casual apps in app stores increased by 170% this year, more than three times compared to the gaming industry average.

The genre’s aggressive use of ad monetization is impacting the entire mobile gaming space, according to Igal Frid, mobile insights specialist at AppsFlyer.

This is particularly the case for “core games,” whose share of in-app advertising revenue has risen 34% since the beginning of the year, according to the mobile-marketing analytics platform.

“As hyper-casual games continue to appeal to a wider audience and larger number of players, the use of in-app ads as a source of revenue is on the rise, driving growth across gaming genres,” Frid notes in the new report. “For businesses across this sector, initiating testing to find the right balance of revenue between in-app ads and in-app purchases is essential.”

More broadly, the boom in hyper-casual games has led other genres to adopt ads as a revenue stream to make up for the declining number of users making in-app purchases, Frid adds.

Alongside a dip in the average number of installs per app, “midcore games,” for example, have seen a 46% drop in the share of paying users, while “hardcore games” have seen a 15% fall.