Gartner predicts $4.5bn of mobile game revenues in 2008

Industry analyst Gartner has released its latest report on the mobile game market, predicting that it'll globally generate $4.5 billion of revenues this year, a 16.1 per cent rise from last year.

By 2011, meanwhile, it's predicting that mobile games will be generating $6.3 billion of revenues. This is worldwide user spending.

Breaking that down, Gartner predicts Asia/Pacific will be the biggest region for mobile games, growing from $2.3 billion this year to $3.4 billion by 2011. North America is next, going from $845 million to $1.2 billion in the same period.

Meanwhile, Western Europe will lag behind a bit, growing from a predicted $701 million this year to $862 million by 2011.

So how accurate are these figures?

EA Mobile reckons its global mobile game revenues will be $185 million in its current fiscal year, running from this April to next March.

Glu has predicted GAAP revenue of between $96.5 million and $100 million for 2008, while Gameloft is aiming for growth of 25-30 per cent on its 2007 figure of €96.1 million (i.e. somewhere between $188 million and $197 million).

Taking the upper end of those predictions (ignore EA's different business year for a moment), that means the three companies are aiming for combined 2008 revenues of $482 million.

If we use a generous estimate that operators are taking 50 per cent of all these publishers' downloads, that means consumer spending of around $964 billion on the mobile games of the three largest publishers.

Subtract that from Gartner's 2008 prediction of $4.5 billion (with a bit of rounding) and you're left with $3.5 billion being spent this year on other companies' games.

That's a helluva longtail right there. Even if a big chunk of those missing revenues come from Asia/Pacific.