Mobile game development is among the fastest-growing avenues to the big bucks in technology today, as highlighted by this infographic from Geekaphone.
Consider these numbers: Mobile gaming industry revenue is projected to reach $8 billion this year, and that figure is expected to soar to $11.4 billion by 2014. Games are the runaway leader in terms of numbers of downloads of paid-for apps on Apple’s iPhone App Store, according to Distimo’s latest study, with games accounting for a whopping 72 percent of all downloads of the top 300 most popular apps there.
But mobile gaming is a tough nut to crack for developers. just ten game publishers account for more than half of all downloads of the top 300 iPhone paid games.
the success stories are easy to track. There’s Rovio, creator of the runaway hit Angry Birds. And PopCap Games, which was recently acquired by EA for a cool $750 million. then there’s social gaming giant Zynga, lurking with a new-found focus on mobile gaming and soon to bring FarmVille public.
Also consider the growth of “freemium” mobile games, free gaming apps that generate revenue via advertising and in-game purchasing. some 35 percent of the 300 most popular iPhone games now use some kind of virtual currency within the game for monetization purposes, Distimo found. Revenue from in-game purchases is projected to reach $11 billion by 2015, according to Geekaphone’s sources.
And there’s one metric that sets mobile gaming apart from the rest of the gaming industry—it’s very nearly gender neutral. some 53 percent of mobile gamers are female, a revelation to those accustomed to the heavy testosterone skew in console and PC gaming circles.
Geekaphone’s Mobile Gaming by the Numbers Infographic
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