The Average Size of the U.S. App Store’s Top Games Has Grown 76% in Five Years

The average mobile game file size on the App Store in the United States has increased by 76 percent since 2016 as publishers continue to launch bigger games and release more content in their existing titles, Sensor Tower App Intelligence data shows.

For our analysis, we looked at the top 100 revenue generating mobile games on the U.S. App Store each year since 2016, and determined each title’s file size based on storage requirements at the end of the year. This only includes the file size for the initial download and therefore does not include the total storage footprint of an app plus additional content.

Storage Surge

The average game file size in 2016 stood at approximately 264 megabytes, and has increased by 76 percent over the last five years to nearly 465 MB in 2020. Last year saw a particularly significant yearly rise, growing by 30.3 percent year-over-year. The median, meanwhile, has risen by 102.6 percent over the last five years from about 147 MB in 2016 to almost 299 MB in 2020. Last year saw a rise of 18.7 percent Y/Y, which was slower than seen in previous years.

The top grossing game on the U.S. App Store in 2020 was Roblox from Roblox Corporation. At the end of 2020, the title had a file size of close to 222 MB, an increase of approximately 20 percent Y/Y and 73.6 percent from 2016. The No. 2 revenue generating game, meanwhile, was Candy Crush Saga from King, which had a file size of about 225 MB by the end of 2020, which actually decreased by 17.2 percent Y/Y, though increased by a modest 5.6 percent from 2016. The title with the largest file size was CSR Racing 2 from Zynga-owned NaturalMotion, which took up 3.8 gigabytes of mobile device storage at the end of last year, an increase of 16.6 percent Y/Y and 123.3 percent from 2016.

Among 2020’s top 10 revenue-generating App Store games in the U.S., DoubleDown from DoubleDown Interactive saw the largest growth in file size last year, increasing by approximately 107 percent Y/Y to slightly more than 99 MB Y/Y. The No. 2 fastest riser was Fortnite from Epic Games, which saw its file size expand by 41.3 percent Y/Y to nearly 315 MB, prior to its removal from the App Store and Google Play in August 2020, while Clash of Clans from Supercell grew 36.5 percent Y/Y to approximately 259 MB.

Rising Expectations

Storage capacity in iPhones and iPads has grown significantly over the past few years, with the latest iPhone 12 Pro housing 512 GB, offering ample room for consumers to install more large apps. In response to a whole raft of trends, including the expanded storage capacity, improved performance, and rising player expectations for content, game sizes have increased every year since 2016. This has led to more “triple-A” experiences on mobile, such as PUBG Mobile from Tencent, Call of Duty: Mobile from Activision, in collaboration with Tencent’s Timi Studios, and Genshin Impact from miHoYo, which have been able to take advantage of the steady hardware improvements over the years and all take up more than 1 GB of space. Such growth in storage and performance also enables publishers to release more content through live ops, without fear of taking up too much space on the consumer’s device, helping to create a more engaged playerbase.