The company earning season is fascinating for people who enjoy playing around with numbers.
Still, it's easy to get lost amongst all those million and billions of dollars, euros, yen and won.
One way to spot trends can be to strip out absolute numbers and just look at rate of growth; something we considered last week.
Another useful trick is to match rival companies that are operating in the same business sector and directly compare their performance over time.
Head-to-head
When it comes to mobile games, there are three obvious matches: EA Mobile and Gameloft; Com2uS and Gamevil; and DeNA and GREE.
EA Mobile and Gameloft are the two largest western mobile publishers; and are similar in size, as well as in business focus i.e. paid, premium branded mobile games across all platforms.
Hence, if we create a ratio of the companies' quarterly sales [the green line], we can gain an idea of their relative performance over the past two and a half years (10 quarters).
Gameloft has smaller sales than EA Mobile throughout (i.e. the ratio is always less than 1), although it almost reached parity in the three months July-September 2010. Since then though, EA has bought iOS publisher Chillingo, which has resulted in it pulling away from Gameloft.
It seems likely as the sales of more recent acquisitions such as PopCap and Firemint are added to its total, this will see the ratio drop down further (i.e. EA sales will grow compared to Gameloft).
Heart and Seoul
Korean mobile publishers Com2uS and Gamevil [purple line] offer up a similar situation.
Both built their business on the back of domestic feature phone sales, and have since been branching out in the global smartphone market.
Looking back five quarters, they were evenly matched for half a year, before Com2uS, which is the larger company in terms of headcount, pulled away for the next two quarters, mainly because of cyclical issues in Gamevil's release schedule.
However this masked the fact that Com2uS' sales peaked in 2009 and were now falling, while Gamevil's were growing fast, something that's now become clear as it's leaped ahead of its rival.
Value of being open
Japanese social mobile platform holders DeNA (Mobage) and GREE [yellow line] are our third comparison.
Again, their business models are very similar - social mobile portals that are mainly feature phone-based, but being migrated to smartphones. Both companies are also aggressively expanding overseas, with DeNA buying ngmoco and GREE OpenFeint.
What's interesting is that two years (8 quarters) ago, DeNA was larger but not significantly so (ratio of 0.8 so a quarter larger). However, as it opened up Mobage so thirdparty developers could launch their games on it, its revenues grew dramatically.
This happened so quickly, a year ago, it had more than double the sales of its rival.
Of course, as GREE has made a similar move, opening up the GREE platform to thirdparties, the line has started to curve upwards, although DeNA's sales remain two thirds as large as GREE's.
Feature
Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
Top Stories
News
Apr 18th, 2024
Fortis team boosted by top ex-King, PopCap EA, Microsoft and Warner Bros. Games talent
News
Apr 18th, 2024
UK skills crisis prompts call for games industry-led body to tackle key challenges
News
Apr 18th, 2024
AI joins the team at King: "Our challenge is to create the right amount of challenge"
Feature
1 hour, 47 minutes ago
Speaker Spotlight: Xsolla's Chris Meredith on making the most of D2C and today's revenue opportunities
Feature
2 hours, 23 minutes ago
Chart Climbers: Brawl Stars, Legend of Mushroom, Sea of Conquest and more rise up the mobile game revenue rankings
News
Apr 17th, 2024
Monopoly GO! celebrates its first birthday and shares its behind-the-scenes story
Events
HIT Games Conference Istanbul 2024 | Apr 18th | |
Game Job Fair – Spring Edition 2024 | Nordic | Apr 18th |
Arts DAO Fest 2.0 | Middle East | Apr 20th |
App Promotion Summit London | Europe | Apr 25th |
Esports Future Summit | Middle East | Apr 27th |
Dubai GameExpo Summit 2024 | Middle East | May 1st |
The MENA Games Industry Awards 2024 | Middle East | May 2nd |
GameDev Atlantic 2024 | May 4th |