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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Analysis and Opinion   >   Analysis   >   The iPhone ain’t a games platform if the best-selling game of all time only reached 4% of the audience

The iPhone ain’t a games platform if the best-selling game of all time only reached 4% of the audience

By on January 20, 2010

Bolt Interactive has just announced some impressive numbers for Pocket God.

Pocket God screenshot

The game has sold 2 million units since its launch in January 2009. That’s pretty impressive sales, even for a title that costs only $0.99.

But there’s a great big cloud to this silver lining.

Pocket God is probably the best-selling iPhone game now. (Not necessarily the highest grossing, though, given the wide variety of price points in the App Store).

But its penetration rate is abysmal.

In the console market, a breakout game, one that has gone so mainstream that it feels as if everyone has played it, has a 15-20% penetration. So, for example, with the Xbox 360 having an installed base of 39 million units, a breakout game would sell between five and eight million units. That’s the kind of numbers that only games like Grand Theft Auto or Modern Warfare 2 can achieve.

In contrast, Pocket God has a penetration rate of 4% (2 million sales divided by an estimated 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches). This is not to detract from Bolt Interactive’s success – I think they’ve done an awesome job – but to point out that, despite all the hype, the iPhone is still not primarily a gaming platform.

Which we all need to remember when thinking about installed bases and forecasting unit sales.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com