In another ‘duh’ moment, M:Metrics has been keeping track of mobile gaming lately, and found that 75% of the nearly 100 million people they surveyed throughout Western Europe and the U.S. who played a game on their handsets, found that game pre-installed on their phone. Meanwhile, a respectable 38.5 million mobile gamers had downloaded a game, though that’s not really much of an increase over last year’s 35.3 million. Meaning people like gaming, but they can’t be hassled to download new games when there’s a few perfectly good games for free already on their handsets.
I like this quote from Seamus McAteer, Chief Product Architect and Senior Analyst at M:Metrics, who said, “While these devices lend themselves to mobile media consumption, the openness of smart platforms opens up the Internet and frees consumers from the operator deck. To succeed in such a market, game publishers will have to foster new models that may include subscriptions to online gaming communities, ad-funded or subsidized gaming, and physical distribution.”
Physical distribution? Um, N-Gage 1.0 died a few years ago, with that being a major reason. As always, the whole report is here for your perusal.