Informa Telecoms & Media has released a report predicting that mobile games will grow to a US$7.2 billion business worldwide by 2011. Most of this will be in Asia, with North America expected to overtake Europe (see the graph below). However, there are a lot of problems that need to be overcome before the industry goes mainstream, including “the difficulty consumers encounter finding, purchasing and downloading mobile games”. I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere before…
“The quality of mobile games has improved significantly over the past year, but it will be tough to convince consumers of that until the content discovery and provisioning process is simplified,” says Chris Coffman, senior analyst at Informa and author of the report. “Though mobile gaming has grown into a US$2.4 billion business in 2006, it is not yet a mass-market activity. The 5% of mobile subscribers who download mobile games today won’t be the engine driving the next five years of growth in the industry. Mobile operators, content providers and others in the gaming ecosystem need to work together to make mobile gaming more attractive to the remaining 95%.”

Global Mobile Games revenues by region 2006-2011 — Informa Telecoms & Media
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