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.
Whats 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 comScores breakdown of growth in this sector of the mobile industry:
Downloaded Mobile Game by Platform: Audience Three-month average ending November 2007 vs. November 2008 US Mobile Phone Users (000s) Source: comScore M:Metrics
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 iPhones App Store (alongside mobile providers like Vodafone and O2 hosting their own download services), we can expect even more impressive figures come November 2009.
