by John Onorato
These days, you’re hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have at least one mobile device in their pocket. Odds are that they have at least one game on that phone, music player, or whatever it might be. True, that game might have been preinstalled – remember the iThings that had Maze, where you would tilt the device around, causing the accelerometer to move the ball through the game?
More often than not, though, games that people have on their devices far transcend the paltry OEM offerings like Maze, Vortex and Klondike, which are Apple’s current out-of-the-box offerings. We use the iTunes Store and the Android Play Store to download better and more popular games. And as phones get more and more powerful, we now have games on those phones that rival offerings on dedicated devices such as the Playstation Vita or the Nintendo WiiU.
The living room landscape is quickly changing …
Turns out that so many people are playing mobile games these days, it’s beginning to look like the landscape of the living room will soon be changing forever, at least in terms of game consoles changing. Let’s face it: Smartphones and tablets are still changing rapidly, whereas the Xbox One is pretty much just an incremental upgrade from the 360. Same for the PlayStation 4.
And let’s not forget the mobility factor. You take your phone with you wherever you go; your tablet gets tucked in your bag when you dash. At the same time, though, your console is more or less permanently tethered to your television set. That mobility counts for a lot, especially in urban areas, say, on a long commute, where there’s ostensibly nothing to do.
Just don’t get me started on how the rise of mobile technology is contributing to the separation and fracturing of humans who would rather have their noses in a phone, and not making friends with their neighbors. End rant.
Interested in where the money is going? There’s an awful lot of it in mobile gaming. According to Gartner, a leading information technology research firm, mobile gaming alone is expected to take up at least 20 percent of the market by 2015. Purchases made for mobile platforms are expected to amount to roughly $112 billion by 2015. And as reported by Flurry Analytics, a leading mobile analysis provider, upwards of 80 percent of all proceeds generated last year by mobile applications were – you guessed it – games. And very recently, of the top 100 money-making iOS apps, more than three out of every four were games.
$112 billion? Really. Better start working on your app now, huh?
Where is all the money going?
And for the largest slice of that pie, get cracking on the next version of Flappy Bird. Because mobile gaming is huge. Huger than huge. You think Texas is big? Texas ain’t got nothin’ on gaming, which overshadows pretty much every other activity. That eclipses activities that might seem to be universal among smartphone owners, like checking email, texting, reading news, or even actually calling people. Gaming is capturing the eyeballs of about 60 percent of tablet owners, as well.
You might think users would be more engaged with friends on Facebook or other social networks, but interestingly, they’re spending more time playing games on their tablets and phones. Perhaps more dramatically said, add up the time that users spend reading books and magazines, listening to music, and watching videos. That time doesn’t even approach, much less equal the total time spent playing games.
Like it or not, we’ve got miniature computers in our pockets and backpacks. Small wonder that they’ve become gaming platforms, as well as being taking on the tasks that they were originally designed for. They just happen to be able to do a lot of other things as well. Sure, we can read news, watch videos, talk to friends, whatever. We’re human, after all, and we just love our games.
Just get working on that Flappy Angry Maze Klondike Bird game if you want your slice of that mobile pie.
