A recent research by Newzoo on mobile gaming in US, UK, France and Germany has revealed a considerable increase in the number of mobile gamers to 101 million from 75 million. 21% of mobile gamers use tablets, 69% opt for smartphones and 19% still use regular mobile phones. Surveys were conducted on 17,000 respondents, with a blend of Android and iOS users.
Download data of the top 200 grossing games was taken into consideration. The number of mobile gamers who pay for services constituted about 36% of the total number of mobile gamers. Gamers prefer iOS games over games offered by Android. Players in America are known to spend over five times more on iOS games than what they spend on Android games.
Detailed research revealed that 19 million of the total number of mobile gamers, constituting about 28% of overall gamers using smartphones, used the iPhone for gaming. In addition to that, another 18 million users took to the iPod Touch for gaming. Among gamers who used tablets, 60% of them used the iPad, placing Apple in the dominant position with respect to revenue from gaming. Apple, through several of its devices, produced 84% of the revenue generated by mobile games in March this year. Strangely, both in the case of Android and iOS run devices, 91% of the money is spent more within the game than on downloading the game.
What makes Apple the preferred option is the fact that they need their users to connect their credit cards straight to their account and this makes the whole purchase procedure rather flawless. According to Peter Warman, the CEO of Newzoo, while companies like Google or Microsoft can hardly manage such services, Amazon is working efficiently well on developing themselves at this and the proof is their tablet, Kindle Fire which has managed to double Android’s revenues.
However, unlike in America, 34% of gamers in France still use regular phones. Between US and UK, Android earns 16% of the revenue in US, mainly on account of the Kindle Fire, while their revenue from UK continues to be as low as 6%. Tablets provide mobile gamers with a better experience on account of their screen resolution and rise in power processing potential. Consumers are looking for casual gameplay and do not want to spend hours in trying to learn a game. This explains why developers are now trying to focus on one such mid-core market.
