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HappySqurriel on 15 August 2012
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kowenicki said:
HappySqurriel said:
I would really like to know where these analysts are getting their numbers from ...

The mobile app and game market is primarily made up of companies bleeding money or individuals who are working for "free". A couple guys who spend 40 hours a week (combined) for six months developing their mobile game, releases it in an ad based format, gets 500,000 downloads each with an average of 40 ad impressions, and sees an ECPM of $5.00 from these ad impressions, may be happy with the $100,000 they earned; but that is more downloads, more ad impressions, and a higher ECPM than most of these games get; and a business paying these guys a typical salary with reasonable benefits would basically break even on this performance.

The mobile app/game market is a lot like the dot com market of the late 1990s ... Lots of products with impressive usage without the business model to monetize it, and most efforts to monetize it result in a dramatic decrease in usage


did you read my post above yours?  again you are falling into the trap of thinking about mobile games as just free to play low budget shallow games.

I have many previous dedicated franchise games FIFA, DEAD SPACE, CHAOS RINGS, GTA, FF, RAGE for the ipad all from big names in gaming, EA, Square, Rockstar

then you have middle range like REAL RACING, INFINITY BLADE, SHADOWGUN all new and very good quality

then you have the lower end stuff that still has some great games with real depth.

This is what obile gaming is about, pick up and play, maybe for only 5 minutes at a time, maybe for an hour or so.  Handhelds are not the same as home consoles, at least Nintendo understand this.

These smartphone and tablet games make money, they will make more money as time passes.  Dedcated handhelds are on borrowed time.

I'm of the complete opposite view, and mobile revenues have mostly peaked with much more slow growth in revenues in the future, the "bubble" will burst with most (small) developers going out of business, and the major publishers will eventually be forced to treat the mobile market as a third pillar ...

The thing that is rarely talked about in regards to the revenue numbers of the major publishers is how much of their revenue is generated by hardware manufacturers bundling their games with their hardware. Certainly, EA earns less per unit from bundled games, but with tens of millions of copies of games being "Sold" when people buy a phone or tablet they make a significant amount of revenue which doesn't relate to the health of their market. A couple hundred million devices being sold in a year, each providing $2 to $5 in revenue to major publishers distorts the real health of the market dramatically.