Statistics from the mobile games forum

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If you missed some of the best figures from the Mobile Games Forum, either because you weren’t there or because you were too busy networking, don’t worry. GAMESbrief has you covered.

The mobile games market in the EU

(Source: Jeremy Copp, Commscore)

• Over 40% of the total EU5 audience now use mobile media.
• Smartphone ownership has now reached 94 million – that’s equal to 40% of the population
• 59% of phone devices sold are smart phones, and that number is growing
• Android’s market share has increased from 8% in September 2010 to 26.2%, while iPhone ownership has stayed at around 20%
• Meanwhile, RIM’s share of the smartphone market plummeted between September 2010 and September 2011, from 81.8% to 33.9%
• Smartphone owners are 237% more likely to use mobile media, though Microsoft and Symbian OS users are less likely to do so.
• The most installed app type is arcade games, and the most purchased are card and casino games.
• 25% of mobile phone users (62 million consumers) have played a mobile game in the past month. 13 million play every day. Most games played are pre-loaded onto the handset. Browser game play is in the minority, but still accounts for 4 million players.
• 60% added two games in a month. The heavy users downloading 5 or more made up 12%.
• Chat and gifting are not popular ways to engage socially in a game compared to leaderboards, invites and multiplayer modes.
• 15% of players have made an IAP in their entire history of app use. 42% of the IAP sold are virtual goods. Does 15% seem low to you? Read about power laws and learn why you will still make money.

Changes to the mobile space

Neil Trevett from Nvidia estimated that, thanks to advances in smartphone hardware, by 2015 2 billion console-class gaming devices will ship – for comparison, actual consoles typically ship in the tens of millions.

Ross Sleight of Somo revealed that 15% of online retail happens on mobile phones. 97% of that occurs via iOS, 79% of that via the iPad. Peak mobile app use happens betwen 7-9pm. He recommended development of games for tablets not just because of the high rate of e-commerce on that platform, but also because of this peak use time – in the evening, tablets are shared within households, so your audience includes tablet owners’ children and spouses.

The games market will grow from $50 billion to %115 billion by 2017. Mobile and social games will make up $100 billion of that, with console gaming shrinking from $35 billion to $15 billion, said Rob Unsworth of Digital Chocolate, citing the Evercore / Gartner Forecast.

He also cited the recent Juniper forecast saying that IAPs will grow from $2.1 billion to $4.1 billion by 2016. Also, a Distimo report indicated that revenue from freemium constitutes 50% of all revenues on iOS and 65% of those on Android.

Mobile game performance indicators

• Tequila’s ARPPU is around £4-5, with a conversion rate of 8%
• Some of Papaya’s Android games are seeing an ARPPU of $10 and a conversion rate of 15-20%
• Natural Motion’s My Horse has been downloaded 8 million times. Since introducing a tutorial, their retention rate has increased from 38.5% to 44%.
• Volkswagen Scirocco challenge by Fishlabs has reached 2.5 million downloads, generated 625,000 hours of gameplay, which has converted into 17,000 brochures and 9,000 test drives for Volkwagen.
• Read more about performance indicators on the pages for ARPPU, conversion, retention and number of downloads.

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