Telephia: One In Three Mobile Games Given Away

I caught up with Kanishka Agarwai of Telephia at CTIA, which is showing off its On Device Meter which measures what content people actually use rather than what they report in surveys. As to the market share of mobile games, Jamdat has 31%, apparently largely due to its licensing of Tetris. Then there’s seven companies with between 4-7% and the other 29% contains about 150 companies. As you can see in the press release, although 48% of puzzle games are given away free the category has the largest share of revenue, claiming 27.1% of the cash spent according to Telephia. There’s no direct correlation though, since sports and racing games claim 15.8% of the market and only 25% of the titles are given away free…the other categories have about the same market share but wildly varying free downloads. And yes, women use mobile games more than men, buying 55% of the games sold. Everyone knows this now, although few people seem sure what to do about it. It’s true that there are far more action games put on the market than puzzle games, but…Tetris is a great game, but how many different falling block games do you need?
The only category in which men bought more games than women was sports/racing. Even the action/adventure category was bought equally by both genders. In another panel Lucy Hood from Newscorp gave a hint to the future of mobile gaming: “In her shoes, a game designed to appeal to the female demographic”.
Agarwal said that everyone is trying to get on the carrier deck, and they’re looking for games to bump up their ARPU, so publishers need to be able to prove their games will bring in revenue…
Our CTIA/MES coverage is sponsored by Motricity: Booth 717.

Comments have been disabled for this post