In an interesting piece of market work, ABI Research and app company Mobidia have been looking at the usage patterns of key mobile games during 2013.
The situation arises thanks to Mobidia's My Data Manager app, which enables the company to collect anonymous data about how people use their smartphones, both iOS and Android.
In that respect, the companies point out the group generating the survey is likely to be more tech savvy than the general public and hence have higher usage rates. Also, from a statistic point of view, this is a self-selecting group - potentially skewing the results.
Nevertheless, the results themselves are pretty interesting.
Crushing the opposition
When it comes to both monthly and weekly usage, on iOS and Android King's Candy Crush Saga is far-and-away the most popular game, having at least double the rate of the next most popular game - Temple Run 2 on iOS and Subway Surfers on Android - on a weekly and monthly basis.
However, when an engagement rate is generated - by dividing the percentage of the survey who played weekly by the percentage who played monthly - the difference is less noticeable.
Indeed, on iOS, Clash of Clans had a high engagement rate than Candy Crush Saga's 70 percent, while Words With Friends and Hay Day were comparable.
On Android, Candy Crush had the highest engagement rate in the survey, with Words With Friends being the closest challenger.
Here be lots of dragons
Looking deeper into usage on Android during 2013, the survey found some interesting data in terms of weekly sessions.
Albeit from a small, Japan-centric user base Puzzle & Dragons had a weekly session rate of 102, compared to 63 for Clash of Clans.
(Mobidia didn't track these two games as Puzzle & Dragons' success was localised in Japan, and Clash of Clans wasn't released on Android until mid way through 2013.)
Candy Crush Saga's rate peaked during February 2013 at more than 40 sessions per week, falling away to around 25.
More impressive, however, has been the performance of Words With Friends, which dropped to around 35 sessions per week, before rising to over 40; something Zynga called out in its recent Q3 earnings statement.
And it was a similar pattern in terms of weekly minutes of gameplay, with Puzzle & Dragons racking up an impressive 7 hours per week, compared to 3 hours 45 minutes per week for Candy Crush Saga.
You can check out the complete survey here.
