Google Play in-app purchases fall 29% in RPGs and 50% in casino games

• AppMagic’s Monetisation Report 2025 has revealed a decrease in payments and total revenue generated by games on the Google Play Store.
• Revenue has risen by 5% on the App Store and 46% from DTC.

The number of in-app purchases being made on Google Play is decreasing, down by 29% in RPGs and 50% in casino games.

According to AppMagic’s Monetisation Report 2025, Google Play has been hit harder by a decrease in payments than the App Store.

In overall revenue, Google Play has declined by less than 1% while the App Store has grown by 5% this year, leading to an average increase between the major stores of slightly over 3%.

AppMagic noted major growth for the hypercasual genre, up 88% in revenue year-over-year, but midcore and casual games only grew by up to 3%.

"Compared to last year, the mobile games market has not changed dramatically," AppMagic stated.

DTC: a tool or a trend?

Revenue from direct-to-consumer and alternative payment methods has grown by 46%.

However, despite legislative changes feeding into the DTC trend, fewer top-performing games actually utillised this revenue stream in the first half of 2025. In fact, only 62 of the 100 top-grossing games leveraged direct-to-consumer options, versus 72 in 2024.

The mobile market intelligence platform suggested DTC is "a stable tool" for supporting older games, but that "newcomers are in no hurry to integrate alternative payment systems".

Strategy rises, RPGs fall

AppMagic also highlighted market changes by genre, such as strategy revenue rising by 21% on Google Play and 28% on the App Store between October 2024 and September 2025. Certain "major new titles" contributed to this rise, with the report adding how the card game subgenre grew by 213%.

This was likely in reference to Pokémon TCG Pocket, one of the most lucrative new mobile games since its release in October 2024 and a title which outpaced Pokémon Go to the $1 billion mark.

In the strategy genre, "only one niche demonstrated a clear negative trend", namely MOBAs. Meanwhile, card battlers, turn-based strategy games and 4X strategy games all grew.

The RPG genre, meanwhile, saw overall declines between 15% and 30% across all regions, with only roguelike and tactical RPG niches observing any growth.

AppMagic highlighted ONEMT’s Mech Assemble: Zombie Swarm, Habby’s Archero 2, and Bandai Namco’s SD Gundam G Generation Eternal as standout examples, all released in 2025.

In the casino genre, Monopoly Go was a standout for bolstering average revenue per paying user, but even so the genre's total revenue fell by almost 8% on both major stores.

The full report also highlights figures like D90 ARPPU, which was down 42% for RPGs on Google Play.