The vast majority of all revenue generated in the Apple App Store and Google Play comes from games.  Asian countries have a higher revenue share for games compared to North American and Europe.

These findings come from Distimo in its September 2013 report, Games: King of the mobile eco-system based on data extracted from AppIQ, which monitors daily app store downloads and revenues.

AppIQ provides data for 44 countries for the Apple App Store. Here games were the most downloaded apps. On iPhone, 33% of all downloads were games and in iPad the proportion was even higher at 48%.

On Google Play, for which AppIQ collects data from 34 countries, games accounted for 37% of downloads. Here however Entertainment ranked fifth with 6% while this category was the second largest category on iOS, accounting for 9% of downloads.

Distimo now collects data from the Amazon Appstore for the US and the UK and here games accounted for 63%, and entertainment for a further 10%.

In terms of revenue, games are even more significant. The vast majority of all revenue generated by the 400 most popular apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play came from games. For the Apple App Stores 52% of the apps in the TopOverall were games and these apps generated 79% of the revenue of all apps in Top Overall. On Google Play, the number of apps in the Top Overall was lower at 48%, but those apps generated 92% of the revenue in the Top Overall.

Looking at a breakdown of the contribution of games to revenue across different countries it emerges that it is highest in Asia.

In this chart the countries are arranged by the average revenue share of the Apple and Google stores combined and Taiwan (combined revenue share 89%) comes first, followed by Korea where 94% of Google Play revenue came from games and Japan. Australia, Canada are the US are in the middle of the chart with European countries, France, UK, Russia and Germany at the left. The Distimo report comments:

Germany performed the lowest in terms of revenue share by games. Instead of spending their money on games, Germans preferred to never risk getting lost, as navigation apps were significantly more popular in Germany than in other countries.