EA Mobile head Mitch Lasky has given an interview Reuters about games on iPods — it’s got 11 games on the device going for $4.99 a pop. (UPDATE: Jason Ford from Namco has sent a correction, saying that EA Mobile has 5 of the 11 games, while Apple has 2, Namco has 1, PopCap has 2 and Fresh Games has 1.) Reuters has done a pretty good job of dredging up old figures to cover a dearth of new stats in this interview…mobile gaming accounted for 14 percent of EA’s revenue in the fiscal year ending March 2006 ($393 million) but Lasky refused to reveal how well the games sell on iTunes. I’m guessing it’s significantly less than mobile just by the number of handsets in the market (Apple is also recalcitrant with stats, refusing to reveal what proportion of iPods are video iPods). People would buy a lot more songs for their iPods than games.
That being said, there are some benefits to porting mobile games to iPods. First, the restrictions about about the same, so if you have a game that works on a mobile phone it will work on an iPod (barring connectivity features, of course). Second, all the iPods are pretty much the same, so there’s not a great deal of porting hassle. Finally, the distribution is worked out — it goes through iTunes. So while it may not be huge revenue, it’s probably worth the effort.
There’s an interesting quote from Forrester analyst Paul Jackson, who said that the iPod is the device “you are most likely to be carrying when you end up waiting for a flight, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, etc.”… I hope conversation with the reporter made it apparent he wasn’t including mobile phones.
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