Analysis: Mobile game publishers' Q2 results

With today's announcement of Glu Mobile's second-quarter revenues, we can get a sense of how the mobile games industry is growing - or at least the three largest publishers.

The leader in Q2 was clearly EA Mobile, which generated $44 million of revenues during Q2, a rise of 33 per cent year-on-year.

Second, Gameloft, which posted Q2 revenues of €25 million - around $39.3 million - up 8 per cent year-on-year. Third is Glu Mobile, which just announced Q2 revenues of $23.7 million, up 45 per cent year-on-year.

Of course, there are caveats.

For example, Gameloft says its revenues rose 16 per cent year-on-year on a comparable exchange rate basis, yet its €25 million includes €1.5 million of revenues from non-mobile platforms.

Meanwhile, it's unclear how much of Glu's 45 per cent rise can be attributed to its acquisitions of MIG and Superscape - with the same applying to EA Mobile's purchase of Hands-On Mobile Korea.

But the topline figure is that if you factor out Gameloft's non-mobile revenues, the three publishers collectively generated $104.6 million of revenues from mobile games in Q2 this year, compared to $85.8 million in Q2 last year.

That's 21.9 per cent growth. Although the big question is whether this represents growth for the entire mobile games market, or just the Big Three gaining market share from smaller rivals.

Meanwhile, THQ Wireless is the fourth largest publisher to publicly declare its financials, having generated $5.1 million of revenues in Q2 this year, a 4.2 per cent rise year-on-year.