Video game firms see a gold mine

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: Jenna Wortham

The iPhone has sent rivals scrambling, first to duplicate its glassy touch screen, then its successful mobile application storefront.

Now it is the video game industry that is sitting up and taking notice. Playing games, it turns out, is one of the most popular things to do with an iPhone. Of the 50,000 programmes available for the iPhone and iPod Touch through Apple’s App Store, games are the largest category, about 20% of the offerings, according to the mobile analytics and advertising firm Mobclix. The company also said that more than half of the billion downloads from the App Store are games.

That plethora of games, most of which are free or cost as little as 99 cents, are available in seconds via wireless download, which is driving the expansion of the audience for mobile gaming, said Tuong H Nguyen, an analyst with Gartner Research who tracks the industry. “Like many other features of the iPhone, it introduced the possibility of gaming on your phone to a whole new group of consumers,” Nguyen said.

Called casual gamers, these people who play a game for a few minutes here or there are a sought-after group by a video-game industry searching for growth. Sylvia Martinez, a 52-year-old educator living in Los Angeles, is one of them. Martinez, who owns a 3G iPhone, said she had never played games on her cell phone before she bought the iPhone. “With older phones, the games were so hard to play,” she said. “With the iPhone, everything works so well.”

Greg Joswiak, head of marketing for the iPhone and iPod, said, “This is the future of gaming.” The company has emphasised iPhone gaming in several television commercials. At the press conference in early June where the iPhone 3G S was introduced, the company ran a long video featuring testimonials from game developers.

The popularity of gaming among iPhone users—some 79% of all iPhone owners have downloaded games, compared with 31% of smartphone users in general, according to data from the Web analytics firm Compete—has game publishers flocking to get their titles on the platform.