Mobile Gaming a Driver for Mobile Content

IGN Entertainment has released a report — Mobile Gamers: Early Adopters Establish a Booming Industry — which finds mobile gamers are key growth drivers for the mobile industry. The survey (which looked at mobile gamers as a subset of gamers) shows that mobile gamers are more likely to replace their handset twice a year or more, spend 25% more on hardware and are willing to pay 75% more for mobile games. The report also found that mobile gamers are “significantly more likely than other gamers to use their cell phones for non-gaming tasks such as downloading content and Internet access”.They prefer to buy mobile games on the handset rather than PC and via pay-per-download rather than a subscription model, and consider multiplayer gaming to be important.

via MocoNews

More Mobile Gaming Acquisitions

In a short note on analysts at Robert W Baird reducing their “outperform” rating on Jamdat Mobile to $27, the analyst adds: “The deal would prompt other traditional gaming developers to make similar acquisitions in the mobile content market in the near future”.On the topic of Jamdat NYT has a piece with some expert opinion…
Evan Wilson, a video game industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said Jamdat, which makes simple games like bowling, Tetris and poker for handsets - games that typically sell for $5.99 - fit the Electronic Arts mold of making general-interest titles.
Electronic Arts “has become successful making games that don’t necessarily serve the hard-core gamer, and the mobile phone is the latest platform to serve that market,” Mr. Wilson said.
The BBC described Jamdat as a “mobile minnow”, which is an odd thing to call the company with the largest share of the US mobile game market.The Consumer Electronics Stock Blog has some reactions to the news, my personal favorite being from Glu Mobile CEO Greg Ballard: “[This acquisition] may be a signal to everyone watching that even the world’s largest games company couldn’t do this on their own.”Joseph Laszlo at JupiterResearch thought the move was an obvious exit strategy for Jamdat, adding “It’ll be interesting to see how EA experiments with using a cellphone port of a title as a complement to, or perhaps even a preview of, a title about to be released on another platform.”