After a flurry of financial results, we now have an idea of how well the larger players in the mobile games industry did in Q3 this year.
It's best presented in table form, showing each publisher's Q3 revenues (in dollars - we've converted Gameloft's 26.2 million), alongside the year-on-year change from Q3 2007, and also the sequential change from Q2 2008.
| Publisher | Q3 revs ($) | YoY change | QoQ change |
| EA Mobile | $47m | +24% | +6.8% |
| Gameloft | $33.5m | +8% | +4.8% |
| Glu Mobile | $23.9m | +44% | +0.8% |
| THQ Wireless | $6.2m | +27.8% | +21.6% |
A quick caveat: this table isn't showing that THQ WIreless is the fourth largest mobile games publisher in the western world - it's just the fourth largest that declares its revenues publicly.
The analysis
There's little doubt about the pecking order among the Big Three, with EA Mobile the leading mobile games publisher by a distance, followed by Gameloft, and then Glu Mobile.
It's worth noting that both EA and Glu have made acquisitions between Q3 2007 and Q3 2008 - Hands-On Korea in EA's case, and MIG and Superscape in Glu's case.
Gameloft argues that this has skewed both firm's growth rates, and although this is something to bear in mind when assessing who's doing well and why, it doesn't disprove the pecking order in terms of revenues.
The most important thing, though, is that all four companies grew their revenues year-on-year - whether you strip out the impact of acquisitions or not. The mobile games market is still growing, for the bigger fish at least.
But equally clear is that there has been a slowdown between Q2 and Q3 this year, although THQ appears to have had a storming Q3.
Other trends
Looking at these results, and talking to Gameloft and Glu Mobile (EA and THQ aren't giving interviews around their mobile results), some trends do emerge.
First, the impact of the iPhone in Q3. With the App Store now Gameloft's single largest customer, it's not unreasonable to suggest that a decent chunk of the publisher's sequential growth in Q3 came from iPhone.
The fact that Glu was more cautious is one explanation for its flat sequential growth, although it should be borne in mind that THQ Wireless also didn't release that many iPhone games during the quarter.
The second trend is the overall financial outlook, and how the current economic slump is affecting or will affect mobile games.
Glu was notably downbeat, saying that a slowdown in handset sales is directly affecting mobile game sales. Gameloft was more upbeat, suggesting that the positive impact of having iPhone, N-Gage and Android in the market - all with 'better' retail and discovery mechanisms than traditional carriers - will outweigh the wider economic woes.
We'll probably have to wait for the Q4 figures in January to judge which view is more accurate.
The third trend that will be interesting to follow in the coming months is the expense of making the most of these new advanced mobile platforms. Glu in particular will be under scrutiny, in terms of whether it can invest in these platforms while also cutting back its cash burn.
