The Coronavirus-induced lockdown and restrictions on the opening of schools, malls, gyms and other daily activities have meant greater downloads of gaming apps across the world and India is contributing significantly to the numbers of some popular apps.
India had the highest number of downloads for two apps — My Talking Tom Friends and Stack Colors — which were launched in June. According to Sensor Tower data, these two games had garnered 36 million and 32 million downloads respectively globally in July and have been dominating the gaming segment.
The countries with the most installs for My Talking Tom Friends by Outfit7 during the period were India contributing 29.7% to its total download and Brazil at 11%. For Stack Colors, the contribution from India was 18.6% followed by Indonesia at 8.7%.
For the uninitiated, Outfit7 is a Slovenian video game developer founded by Samo and Iza Login. In January 2017, the company was acquired by United Luck Consortium and then sold to China-headquartered Zhejiang Jinke for over $1 billion. Stack Colors is developed by Voodoo, a French company.
Subway Surfers, developed by Denmark-based SYBO Games, has managed to become the third most-downloaded app worldwide in July, dethroning some of the old players from the third position. India cornered 20% of the total 23 million downloads for Subway Surfers in July.
It’s worth noting that India was a hub for PUBG in terms of downloads and the Tencent-backed gaming app was among top three gaming apps between March till May. While PUBG wasn’t in the list of banned apps by the Indian government, the sentiments against Chinese-origin apps over a border clash between Chinese and Indian forces might have affected the number of downloads for the app. In June and July, PUBG was at the fifth spot in the top gaming downloads list.
In home-grown apps, only Ludo King maintained its position in the global top 10 list and ranked 8th in July.
A separate report by Sensor Tower also revealed that the most-downloaded gaming app in India during the April-June quarter was Ludo King, which generated 48.3 million installs followed by PUBG Mobile with 30.8 million installs.
