Tencent Holdings and ByteDance raked in the highest app revenue in the first half of 2022, a latest report from mobile market intelligence service SensorTower showed.

According to the report, Chinese social network and gaming giant Tencent was the top earner among both game and non-game app operator, generating about US$4.4 billion in revenue over the six-month period primarily driven by hit popular game Honour of Kings and PUBG Mobile. It has invested for varying size of stakes in gaming developers and publishers around the world.

Tencent, which is best known as the operator of WeChat, has built juggernaut – a media and entertainment empire encompassing games, music, film and television shows.

In the video game segment, Tencent raked in US$2.6 billion, which accounted for almost 10 per cent of the entire US$27 billion gaming app market.

Beijing-based ByteDance, the owner of hugely popular short video app Douyin and Tiktok, generated a total app revenue of US$1.3 billion in the same period.

According to Sensor Tower, the top 1 percent of game publishers accounted for 93 percent of revenue generated in the first half of 2022 with a total of US$27 billion collectively generated by 460 game publishers. The remaining 46,000 publishers held 7 percent of market share or US$2 billion.

Sensors Tower’s report also showed that how much the large companies dominated game app download activities, with the top 1 percent took more than 79 percent of the market worldwide and 22 billion downloads from across both Apple’s and Google’s platforms.

The SensorTower report covered 900,000 worldwide game and non-game app makers, of which 106,000 were mobile game publishers which have at least 1 download.  

Although these top publishers still represent the majority of downloads and revenue, the mobile market has increasingly become more democratized. The top 1 percent’s market share has shrunk over the last three years, reaching the lowest ever since 2019 in the first half of 2022, according to SensorTower.