US Q4 Mobile Game Sales $151 Million — Telephia

According to Telephia mobile game sales in the US for the fourth quarter last year reached $151 million, and increase of 61 percent over the same period in 2005. Around 17.4 million people downloaded a mobile game in the fourth quarter, and increase of 45 percent from the 12 million downloaders of a year ago. Compared to the third quarter last year, the fourth quarter sales rose 7.9 percent (from $140 million) and the number of downloaders rose 10.8 percent (from 15.7 million). Telephia reckon that a slowing of growth revenue is consistent with a market that is maturing.
Carrier portals still dominate the industry, representing 74 percent of total mobile game revenues (although that is lower than in the past). EA Mobile took 28 percent of the on-portal market, followed by Gameloft and Glu with 11 percent each, then a third tier of players with 2-6 percent share (Namco, I-play, Digital Chocolate, Hands-On Mobile, Superscape, Capcom and Oasys Mobile).
with the Games Developers Conference coming up games there are some preliminary pieces on games…Technology Review has a piece on market fragmentation and the difficulties game publishers face in porting games to all the different handsets and carrier settings, noting that it will be talked about at GDC. I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s been talked about for years and little has been done to fix it, or is likely to be done. There’s the suggestion that everyone should adopt mobile Linux because it already has the Linux community, but that argument could also be made about Symbian and Windows Mobile.
The Wall Street Journal has a state-of-the-industry piece up, noting the big digital game publishers going on the acquisition trail to get into mobile games.

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