iPhone Games

• Games are available in your pocket, without needing to buy a separate device.

Convergence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftf4riVJyqw&feature=related

The Big Numbers• Addressable base of 50m+ devices– 30m iPhones and 20m iPod touches

• More than 3 billion App Store downloads– 15 of the top 20 Top Grossing Apps on the App Store

are games• Of the 65,000 available applications, roughly 11,000

are games (compare to 732 Xbox360 games)• The iPhone gaming market controls $250 million USD

in revenue since its launch in July of 2008, making it larger than any console’s digital game service (XBLA, PSN, WiiWare/VC)

• PlayStation Portable took 3 years to ship 25 million units

The equation

Developer70%

30%Apple

• 30% cut that Apple demands in return for providing the purchasing infrastructure and delivery platform

• Convergence – the delivery platform is the same device as the playing platform

• Developers are self-publishing via iTunes

Developer

Publisher

Retailer

Developer Apple

www.iphonegamesbulletin.com

Developers Striking It Rich• 10m Paid iPhone games sold by Gameloft since

the launch of the App Store• $1,687 Revenues per hour of development time for

NimbleBit’s Scoops ($269,929 total)• 2m Tap Tap Revenge 3 downloads in a week

last Christmas after going free• 10 days How long it took Playmesh to rack up

1m free downloads of iFarm• 13.5m Downloads of Backflip Studios games in

seven months ($1.75m of revenue)• 79,422 Doodle Jump’s sales on Christmas Day alone

Rank Title Units Sold Current Price

1 Tap Tap Revenge Classic 4,036,348 $0.99

2 Fieldrunners 1,638,916 $2.99

3 Flight Control 1,381,320 $0.99

4 Touchgrind 990,086 $4.99

5 Zombieville USA 960,868 $1.99

6 iShoot 843,392 $1.99

7 Super Monkey Ball 748,063 $5.99

8 Hero of Sparta 747,716 $0.99

9 Enigmo 686,160 $2.9910 The Sims 3 669,280 $9.99

http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5113

• Mobile games represent about 25 percent of the entire game development community, or more than twice the 12 percent from before. Apple's presence is believed to have spurred on most of the growth

• 19 percent of all game developers are writing for the iPhone and iPod touch. The figure is more than twice as high as for the DS and PSP

• Xbox 360/PS3 Game ≈ 350,000 person hrsiPhone Game ≈ 2,000 person hrs

How the iPhone market works

• Most games get lost in the clutter of so many iPhone apps

• The market is very top heavy – between 10 and 15% of iPhone gaming titles take up 90% of revenue

• Success is short-lived– 72% of games still played after 30 days– But only 23% after 60 days, and 16% after 90 days

Top Grossing Games chart

• Avg Price: $4.74

• The difficulty of distinguishing your game from among of tens of thousands apps becomes key

• As competition heats up app makers are dropping prices to stay on top of the download charts

• iTunes AppStore ‘Top 100 list’ is the most popular way of reaching users, becoming a marketing tool

• Because developers need to keep apps cheap to make sure that download levels are high enough to get on the top lists, they have less incentive to invest a lot of time and money in creating higher quality apps.

• Rise in free-apps paid for by advertising

App Store• Note that for mobile

market, things are different from a traditional console market where it’s the hardware that fights against each other

• As a result, it becomes a battle between whose app store is more popular

The Future• 36 million Number of iPhones that Apple will sell

in 2010 (Piper Jaffray)• $2.8 billion iPhone games revenues in 2014 –

24% of handheld market (DFC)

iPhone vs Android

• Android is an Open-Source mobile OS• Customisable UI – across many devices and

manufacturers• Android Market – similar business model to

AppStore, except no approval process for apps• Currently 20,000 apps available for Google's

Android