There’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that one of the most popular category of applications amongst today’s smartphone toting populace are games. They’re useful for when you want to kill 5 minutes and they make your morning commute all the more enjoyable compared to say staring out the window while you listen to the same songs you have on your MP3 player because you are too lazy to change them. PopCap Games, a firm that makes games for both mobile devices and PC/Mac system, conducted a survey with 2,425 of their users during the last week of January. They found that 33.6% of all adults in America and the United Kingdom have played a game on their mobile handset during the past month and 24.6% have played in the past week. If you look at smartphone owners alone then that weekly figure jumps up to 83%, which is a testament of how well App Stores, whether they be Apple’s, Google’s, Microsoft’s, or Nokia’s, are at getting people to download apps.
A further 92% of smartphone owners who play mobile games say they play at least once a week, while 45% say they play daily. When you lump feature phones into the mix that daily figure drops to 35%, but again, it still demonstrates that people like to entertain themselves by flinging bird at pigs or whatever the new latest hit has you doing to score points. Now the question developers care about: Is anyone actually paying for games? PopCap says 43% of all mobile gamers and 49% of smartphone gamers have upgraded a free trial game to the full (read: paid) version over the past year; 27% of all mobile gamers and 34% of smartphone gamers say they’ve paid for additional content for an originally free game during the same time frame.
With numbers like this it’s Sony and Nintendo I’m most worried about. Why release dedicated gaming devices when the masses are just fine with cheap games that offer a quick fix?