Game downloads increased 17 per cent in 2008

A new report by comScore highlights the increase in mobile game downloads between November 2007 and November 2008, with a massive boost in smartphone – or feature phone, when counting the likes of the iPhone – usage also evident.

According to the report (which measured US mobile user habits) the number of mobile game downloaders grew 17 per cent from November 2007 to November 2008. This relates to more than 8.5 million mobile subscribers downloading a game to their mobile device.

What’s particularly significant about these figures is how the new breed of feature phone (such as the iPhone and BlackBerry) impacted on game downloads. In 2007, no smartphones were recorded in the top ten most popular devices for mobile gaming, while the 2008 results showed six out of ten were feature rich devices such as the iPhone.

Indeed, the iPhone accounted for 14 per cent of mobile game downloaders, with 32.4 per cent of its users reporting they downloaded a game compared with a mobile market average of 3.8 per cent.

The following is comScore’s breakdown of growth in this sector of the mobile industry:

	November 2007 (000s)	November 2008 (000s)	YoY Growth
Smartphones	734	2,869	291%
Non-Smartphones	6,486	5,593	-14%
Total	7,220	8,463	17%

With the likes of the Palm Pre, Android and Windows Mobile all about to launch their own versions of the iPhone’s App Store (alongside mobile providers like Vodafone and O2 hosting their own download services), we can expect even more impressive figures come November 2009.