US Mobile Game Sales Increase Dramatically

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the stagnation of the mobile games industry…which is belied by a recent survey by Telephia that shows strong growth in sales of mobile games in the US in the first quarter of 2006. “Mobile game sales continue to show strong performance during the first quarter of 2006, with wireless consumers buying more than 8.2 million games on their phones in March, up 53 percent from 5.4 million in January 2006 (see Table 1). The number of unique mobile game buyers also jumped significantly, surging 44 percent from nearly 3.5 million in January to five million in March.” I guess it’s possible that the US industry is taking off but other regions are dropping, or that there was a large drop towards the end of last year — there are no year-on-year stats in the article.
Telephia get its data from the bills of 35,000 mobile consumers, which gives it a good idea as to what revenue has been generated. For example, it’s interesting to compare the top 10 games publishers as listed by Telephia based on revenue with the top ten games publishers listed by M:Metrics, based on downloads.
Top Mobile Game Publishers by Revenue Share (U.S.)
Although Glu Mobile is second behind EA in M:Metrics’ list, it is all the way down in number six in Telephia’s list because it gives away almost half of its games for free. On average, 12% of games downloaded during the first quarter were free, according to Telephia’s findings. There’s actually two companies (Mobiss and Sony Pictures Mobile) that make it into Telephia’s list but not M:Metrics, displacing Digital Chocolate and Konami.

Comments have been disabled for this post