In a new report released by Distimo today, the firm highlights how mobile gaming trends have changed over the past year. It found that the prices of mobile games have declined by 28% from $2.01 to $1.44 over the past year. The ‘Games’ category on the Apple App Store is also the most popular category, with 56% of the top 300 free applications being games.

In-app purchases have dominated in mobile games, particularly in free games where 35% use some form of virtual currency to monetize their app. However over the past year the amount of revenue generated by ‘free’ games and their in-app purchases has increased ten-fold. The revenue-share of games that solely charge an upfront cost now only occupy 27% of revenue raised in App Store games, whilst of those, the top 10 publishers dominate with a 56% share of the revenue. An interesting note is that Andreas Illiger (creator of Tiny Wings) managed to enter that list of top 10 publishers and is ahead of others including SEGA and even Gameloft.

When comparing the various app stores to see which had the highest percentage of games in their catalogues, the iPhone App Store came first and the iPad App Store second – followed by the BlackBerry PlayBook, WP7 Marketplace, Palm App Catalogue, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Android Market, GetJar and lastly the BlackBerry App World. In terms of the growth of games in the app stores, only the iPhone App Store and GetJar saw a faster rate of growth for games – the others all saw the number of other applications growing at a faster rate.