Screen Digest has released its latest research on the mobile games market, claiming that Gameloft is "poised" to overtake EA Mobile as the leading publisher.
The claim is based on the publishers' Q1 figures, which saw Gameloft just $1 million behind EA Mobile.
The bad news for Screen Digest is that its claim comes the day after EA Mobile announced its Q2 revenues of $44 million, $4.7 million ahead of Gameloft's Q2 sales.
"Screen Digest expects Gameloft to usurp EA's leadership position during the remainder of 2008 and then to retain its position as the leading mobile games publisher for the forseeable future," says the company.
The Q2 results imply this isn't a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination.
I've been digging around the two publishers' predicted revenues for 2008, which sheds some light on their views.
In its analyst conference call this week, EA predicted non-GAAP mobile revenues of $185 million during its next financial year (which stretches to the end of Q1 next year).
Meanwhile, Gameloft is predicting that its revenues for 2008 (to the end of Q4 this year) will be between $187 million and $199 million. Although this includes handheld and console games.
In short, both publishers are growing well, but suggesting that Gameloft is poised to overtake EA Mobile seems somewhat premature.
Screen Digest also says the world's top four games publishers (adding Glu and THQ into the mix) took 22 per cent of the global market share in 2007, with that figure rising particularly in Western Europe.
The situation is quite fluid in Europe - THQ Wireless is certainly the fourth largest publisher among those that are public companies and so declare their revenues, but it's debatable whether it's fourth in terms of actual sales.
Screen Digest also talks about the iPhone, predicting that it will drive growth particularly in North America, making that the leading global mobile games market next year in terms of revenues.
However, the analyst warns that technical limitations may still hold developers back from making the most of the iPhone.
You want a headline figure for market size? Screen Digest has one - it reckons the mobile games market will be worth 2.6 billion by 2012 (i.e. around $4.1 billion)
It's admirably restrained, compared to the wild (by comparison) claim by Juniper Research that mobile games would be worth $10 billion by 2009.
Data & Research
Contributing Editor
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)
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