Analyst Angle: Measuring mobile games market share

[admin_mvu]

By Seamus McAteer
Story posted: January 24, 2007 - 12:04 pm EDT

Retail revenues from sales of mobile games in the U.S. totaled about $500 million in 2006 after growing strongly in the second half of the year, representing revenue growth of 30 percent to 40 percent. The market remained highly competitive, with the total number of titles growing to 1,200 in December from 911 in January 2006 as Cingular and T-Mobile expanded the depth of their catalogs considerably. At the end of the year, M:Metrics counted 36 publishers with ten or more titles on operator decks. The problem of deriving accurate measures of market share using statistical sampling is difficult given the proliferation of new titles and the aggressive entry of new competitors such as Vivendi.

Publishers, operators and others in the mobile gaming sector use a number of measures from M:Metrics to track performance of competing content providers. Each month we derive estimates for new purchases of game titles from our survey of about 12,000 mobile subscribers aged 13 and higher in the United States. Survey respondents who purchased a new game are presented with titles based on their device, operator and genre of game downloaded.

http://www.rcrnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll.../70124002/1026