We mentioned in an earlier post about Romanian startup Mavenhut and star game Solitaire Arena entering top 100 games played on Facebook with over 1.3 million active monthly users.
It’s time to talk about the US digital games market that totaled 1.1 billion dollars in sales in July, representing a year-over-year increase of 5.4%, says research firm SuperData.
According to the information shown in the report, a major growth driver was the US mobile games market.
Consequently, mobile games totaled $271 million in revenues in July, up 32% from a year earlier. Overall conversion rates have been consistently above 5%, indicating that mobile gamers are becoming increasingly accustomed to spending on mobile games.
In July it was again Candy Crush Saga (King) and MARVEL War of Heroes (Mobage) that featured as the top grossing apps in the US. Kabam’s The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle Earth came in third as top grossing across all app stores, at the expense of Supercell’s Clash of Clans. 
Facebook’s announcement to enter the mobile games market as a publisher may bring a wind of change to the top of the mobile games food chain, which has been dominated by a small group of titles.
Overall revenues for social games improved and reached $164 million, compared to $133 million last month. The underlying metrics for social games are improving, with July’s conversion rate reaching 2.11% across all categories. SuperData analysts foresee a decline for in August because of the summer season.
In early July, King dethroned Zynga as the leading social game developer on Facebook by number of monthly active users (MAUs), despite having a much smaller portfolio of titles. With social platforms maturing, game companies that offer more complex game play and make better use of social functionality will continue to do well. King’s Candy Crush Saga generated an estimated $438,000/day in the month of July.
The total number of subscription-based MMO players continued its decline to 5.8 million in July, 2013. This is consistent with market leader World of Warcraft’s announcement of losing 600,000 subscribers since its previous quarterly report. The overall segment contracted 9% month-over-month as revenues totaled $76 million.
The PC DLC summer sale across digital distributors like Steam and GamersGate drove an estimated increase of 15% in downloadable PC sales in the US for a total $158 million.
