Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- Macworld reports that Apple’s App Store generated $52.5 billion in gaming revenue in 2025, significantly outpacing Google Play’s $30 billion and Steam’s $11.7 billion combined.
- Despite Google Play capturing 81% of game downloads versus App Store’s 15%, iPhone users demonstrate much higher spending habits on mobile games.
- This gaming dominance makes Apple’s Services division the company’s second-largest revenue generator after iPhone sales, explaining Apple’s resistance to external payment systems.
Apple might not always seem to understand PC gamers, but it remains a hugely dominant force in that market. Newly published research shows that in 2025, the App Store made significantly more money from games than the other two major platforms combined.
According to SensorTower’s State of Gaming 2026 report, which recounts key findings from the previous year and predicts what we can expect in this one, the App Store made gross revenue of $52.5 billion in 2025, compared to just $30 billion for Google’s Play Store and $11.7 billion for Valve’s Steam platform. Steam is doing its best to catch up–its revenue was up 13 percent on the previous year, whereas Google and Apple saw growth of just 2.8 percent and 0.6 percent respectively—but Apple retains its massive lead in the market.
(Just as a note on methodology: SensorTower says its revenue figures for the App Store and Google Play are based on IAPs within games rather than the cost of the games themselves, presumably because the vast majority of apps sold are free. They include both the money made by the games publisher and the percentage skimmed off by the platform holder.)
Interestingly, while Apple is ahead on revenue, it’s a long way behind on volume. SensorTower reports that a whopping 81 percent of downloads in 2025 were on Google Play (that’s all games, not just mobile), compared to 15 percent for Apple’s App Store. The difference is that iPhone owners are far more likely to spend money.
Services, the category of revenue which includes the App Store along with subscription services such as Apple Music and, relevantly to this discussion, Apple Arcade, is a cherished source of income for Apple because it scales so efficiently. There aren’t supply issues when the product is purely digital, and as such, Services is the company’s second-largest revenue generator after the iPhone, and topped S30 billion in the last quarter.
All of which should explain why Apple is so reluctant to allow developers to direct users through their own payment systems in order to reduce or avoid the App Store revenue cut.
A few years back a court ordered the company to allow “buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to [external] purchasing mechanisms,” but its response was to place a fee on purchases made outside the App Store as well as on those made within. This policy, which calls to mind an old Onion article about American Airlines charging non-passengers, did not go down well with the judge. But you can kind of see why they were tempted to try.
