Games rule the app game, according to a new report by Nielsen.
Accounting for 64 percent of apps used in the last 30 days, games beat out weather (60 percent), social networking (56 percent), maps/navigation/search (51 percent) and more to take position as the most popular app category in the United States.
Games are also the kind of app that users would be most likely to shell out money for, according to the study. Ninety-three percent of users who had downloaded an app in the past 30 days were willing to pay for games, followed closely by entertainment (87 percent), productivity (84 percent) and maps/navigation/search (84 percent).
Users played an average of 7.8 hours of games in a month, but those with iPhones played almost twice as long, with an average of 14.7 hours. Android users played for an average of 9.3 hours in the month. But BlackBerry and Windows phone owners, along with "feature phone" owners, played under 5 hours.
While video game sales have suffered recently, mobile games are only getting bigger and bigger. A newcomer to the smartphone market, for example, is the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, a PlayStation-enabled smartphone with a heavy focus on gaming.