February 20th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Research & Stats | 1 Comment »
In the most recent mobile games report from M:Metrics, the company shows that mobile gaming is gaming popularity, but most mobile gamers aren’t buying into the scene.
The percentage of mobile gamers ranges from 14% in France to 28.7% in the UK. The same research shows that the number of mobile game downloaders ranges from 4% in France to 10.6% in the UK.
The big problem for this is the high amount of pirated mobile games out there on the internet. Gamers get educated how to install data on their mobile devices and if they don’t have bluetooth, a data cable often comes standard with the device they purchase. Also, the amount of homebrew software is growing. Mobile gamers that don’t want to move into illegal games, choose homebrew which often comes close enough to the expectations.
Another reason for so called ‘sideloading’ of mobile games is the simple fact that datacharges apply on most purchased games. Downloading a game via the PC is free of additional costs. Also, the marketing of mobile games should improve to increase the number of downloading mobile gamers. The information given by the sales channels is often far from convincing. The download process should be simple and cheap.
Are their any mechanisms or any other experiences available / known how to avoid such “sideloadings”?