February 11th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Research & Stats | No Comments »
Parks Associates has released a study to mobile game purchase behaviour and is predicting that mobile gamers are moving away from carrier decks to more specialized channels, which results in market growth.
Parks Associates shows these results in their latest study “The New Frontier: Portable and Mobile Gaming”. The report is mostly focussed at the U.S., an important market for a lot of mobile game developers and publishers. Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, Director of Broadband and Gaming at Parks Associates estimates that the marketshare for the operator decks will fall from 90% to 72%. By 2012, ad-funded gaming will even account for 28% of the market in the U.S.
"Lack of competition has left most carrier decks with an uninspired user interface and poor merchandising environment, which contributed to the recent market stagnation," said Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, Director of Broadband and Gaming, Parks Associates. "Off-deck marketing and
distribution, combined with new business models such as mobile game advertising, episodic content delivery, and micro-payments, will rekindle industry growth. Many mobile game publishers are working on off-deck initiatives," Cai said. "Even carriers like AT&T are building business-to-business platforms to allow game publishers to market and distribute games directly to mobile gamers."
