The biggest barrier to entry in Mobile Gaming Market is the over whelming number of different mobile handsets on the market. For example one of Electronic Art’s all time best selling mobile games is Tetris. It sells around 20m copies a year. It is also available on 800 different handsets. So that means they are really achieving average sales of just 25,000 units for each handset model.
If you want to see just how complex the world of mobile handsets is then take a look at Getjat’s industry statistics. Getjar , the world’s largest independent mobile apps store, has published metrics that suggest Java (82.72%) and Symbian (28.9%) are two most popular games development platforms. With Nokia 51%, Sony – Ericsson 14%, Samsung 10%, LG 3% and Blackberry 2% being the top 5 handset brands for indie apps and games developers. The majority of sales are for feature phones. For example 75% of EA’s Tetris sales are feature phones.
To truly understand the business of developing mobile phone apps you need to understand the real costs are not in development. Indeed some industry reports suggest Mobile Phone Games come in at below 10% of the cost of developing console games. It is in porting the game to each of the different handsets that incurs the most costs.
The reason the leading publishers remain committed to this fragmented universe of standards and devices is because the number of games-enabled handsets is anticipated to exceed four billion units by 2012.
At the moment Gameloft, the French games publisher, is committed to simultaneously publishing games for 1,200 mobile handsets and devices. That’s 1200 permutations of platform (Java, Brew, Symbian, Apple), screen size, keypad types, processors, manufacturers and models.
In 2009 85.6% of Gameloft’s mobile games revenues came from the Java, Brew and Symbian platforms. The other 14.4% came from Apple.
The average revenue across the other 1200 supported handsets was €81,000.
The average revenue per iPhone game was €320,000.
Gameloft ended last year with a total of 55 games for sale in the App Store and had achieved more than ten million paid downloads since the launch of the App Store in July 2008. According to Finance Director Alexandre de Rochefort late last year they were “selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android”
Now you can see why the mobile games publishers like Gameloft are so enthusiastic about the Apple platform. The profit margins for top selling games published on the Apple platform are significantly higher than the other mobile platforms simple because you don’t have to port the game onto 800-1200 mobile handset configurations.
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