Being a skeptical journalist, I'm never sure about analysts' predictions, especially when applied to a fast growing market, that could be expanding at anything between 10 to 40 percent a year.

Hence, the news from Futuresource, a UK consulting company working across a wide range of markets, from voting systems to classroom display technologies - and, apparently mobile games too - needs to be taken with a strong pinch of salt.

Cloudy crystal ball

It offers several predictions, which are worth attempting to unpick.

The first is that the excluding iPad, game sales on Apple's App Store will generate around $1.7 billion in 2010.

It's hard to see where this figure has come from. However Apple announced $1 billion of total revenue through iTunes during its 2010 Q4, so $1.7 billion for games over a 12 month period might not seem unreasonable.

Yet when you take into account all the music, TV and non-game apps sales, as well as all iPad app and game sales included in that $1 billion revenue during Q4, it feels a bit too high.

For example, spread over an entire year of $4 billion of iTunes sales, that would mean iPhone/iPod touch games made up at least 43 percent of total sales.

Futuresource then goes on to say this figure makes up "almost 30 percent" of the total mobile gaming market.

Again, it's a number provided without reasoned argument. Still a valid point of comparison is that global publisher Gameloft announced in April that iPhone sales made up around 20 percent of its total.

Imprecise Android

The real issue with Futuresource's research however, comes in its breakdown of the rest of the industry.

Reverse engineering Futuresource's games sales total in 2010 from these figures (if $1.7 billion is almost 30 percent), we end up with a value of at least $5.7 billion, which is very close to the figure of $5.6 billion Gartner predicted back in June.

However, breaking this down further, we see that Futuresource reckons 10 percent of the mobile games market consists other app stores "particularly the Android Market," (traditional carrier decks have the remaining 60 percent).

This seems very wrong, as it would mean this total - which is ill defined but includes "particularly the Android Market" - is $570 million.

This is clearly much too high to be assigned to the Android, even as the majority of a category also taking into account BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Ovi store etc.

As developers know only too well, Android Market is currently a marginal commercial operation for paid apps and games, hence Rovio's decision to release the Android version of Angry Birds as a free ad-supported app.

Shooting high

Futuresource also goes on to predict that mobile gaming will be worth a suspiciously rounded numbered $10 billion by 2014.

In comparison, Gartner has a figure of $11.4 billion by 2012.

Personally, my gut feeling is that analysts always over estimate market size because big numbers make people feel happy.

Indeed, back in 2007, I combined the predictions from four companies, all of which over estimated the size of the market by factors of up to three-fold.

[source: Futuresource]