While the free-to-play, or freemium, business model continues to split much of the industry, one of its notable backers has claimed the benefits it's providing may be going largely unnoticed.

Speaking to MacWorld, Aurora Feint CEO Jason Citron said projections regarding gaming growth on iPhone compared to its handheld rivals fail to take into account the considerable boost freemium games are giving the platform.

"We're seeing a huge increase in development activity around these games and believe that virtual goods revenues will grow significantly in the coming months," Citron (pictured) told the site.

"Additionally, our data shows a 500 percent growth in audience size on the iPhone/iPod touch platform in just the past six months."

Industry in transition

Citron believes current analytics offered by the likes of Flurry – which claims iPhone and iPod touch combined are making a considerable impression on the respective market shares of PSP and DS in the US – are "a good starting point", but they don't represent the impact the freemium model is making.

Indeed, the publisher – which as well as developing the OpenFeint platform for iPhone is working on freemium games of its own – believes it has a greater insight into the industry than the analytics firms.

VP of operations Steve Lin commented that the connections the firm has built through the likes of OpenFeint and its freemium variant OpenFeint X (which is currently in beta testing) means it has a wider range of applicable data on its hands.

As a result, Lin believes the trends predicted by Flurry and co. over the past couple of years won't translate well into 2010, with freemium games set to play a major role.

[source: MacWorld]