One year and – barely – nine months. That’s what it has taken Apple to invade 19 per cent of the total US portable game market, while the PSP sunk from 20 per cent to 11 per cent, and the Nintendo dropped 5 per cent. And that’s only revenue.
Taking into consideration that games in the App Store are cheaper than in the PSP and Nintendo, and that 30,000 titles have been released since its July 2008 launch, I wonder if the actual unit sales figures are quite larger.
In the general gaming category, Apple has taken over 5 per cent of the market, while the rest of the portables have increased to 24 per cent from 20 per cent and the home console market has dropped to 71 per cent from 79 per cent. Knowing about these sharp increases – and knowing that iPhone games are still in their infancy – it’s no surprise that game developers are choosing the iPhone en masse.
Another reason for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to worry about the iPad. [Flurry]
mr-crash
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 12:45 PMWhat I think would be interesting additional information, would be the spread of those profits across the installed user base.
I’m guessing the assertion that unit sales for apple are very high is true. What I wonder now, is whether those are spread pretty evenly over the user install base or relegated to a specific segment.
I wonder this, because for the other consoles, a purchase of the console is tantamount to saying you’ve got some particular enjoyment of games and you’re probably going to buy a few (and for comparison, it would be nice to know how many on average a psp owner does buy, versus a DS owner).
But buying an iphone or ipod touch – while they can play plenty of games – isn’t such a statement, You still might buy it just to listen to some music or watch movies or make calls.
What I think might have happened there is the ubiquity of the itunes store on those platforms means that people who have a few minutes to kill decide just to download something, principally because it’s cheap and because it’s not a hassle to do so. I think Apple is playing the game (pardon the pun) Nintendo plays recently, and catering well (albeit possibly incidentally) to an audience largely comprised of casual gamers, but an audience that is well distributed across a very large user base – making even cheap games potentially worthwhile.
Just my guesses of course, but would be interesting to read a bit more about it. Also, the above isn’t to say there isn’t some more “serious” games on the iphone (GTA was surprisingly awesome), just a general trend.
Will
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 2:52 PMPC Games arnt included in the statistics, Id like to see where they come in.