U.S. Mobile Gaming Down 13% Annually, Feature Phone Drop is 35%, comScore is Still Bullish

You might not think a market that declines 13 percent year over year, and declines a whopping 35 percent, year over year, is a "growth" market. But that undoubtedly is the case. U.S. mobile gaming activity declined 13 percent between February 2009 and February 2010, posting a sharper drop of 35 percent among owners of feature phones, according to comScore. So why the optimism?

As it turns out, mobile gaming by smartphone owners increased 60 percent over that same period.
“Although the number of mobile gamers has declined in the past year, there is reason for significant optimism about the future of this market,” says Mark Donovan, comScore SVP. “As the market transitions from feature phones to smartphones, the dynamics of gameplay are also shifting towards a higher-quality experience," and that seems to be why smartphone gaming is up so much.

The inevitable ascent of the mobile gaming market depends not only on smartphone subscribers’ higher propensity to play games on their mobile devices, but also their heavier gaming activity across nearly every dimension, comScore says.

Smartphone subscribers (47.1 percent) are three times more likely than feature phone subscribers (15.7) to play games on their device at least once a month, comScore says.

They are more than five times as likely to play games almost every day and far surpass their feature phone counterparts across various methods of game play.

Smartphone subscribers also install significantly more games on their devices with 27.3 percent having installed at least one game compared to just 5.6 percent of feature phone subscribers.

A third of smartphone subscribers with games have more than five games installed on their phones, while less than one percent of feature phone subscribers have that many games installed.

“Smartphones offer a more accessible and compelling mobile gaming experience that is enabling adoption of this behavior, even among consumers who have not traditionally been gamers,” says Donovan.

And of course we haven't yet seen the impact of devices such as the iPad, which offer bigger screens and therefore potentially better gaming experiences.

Smartphone subscribers are more likely to play mobile games than feature phone subscribers across every gaming genre. The genre with the highest penetration among smartphone subscribers is arcade puzzle games at 12.9 percent, followed by card games (11.9 percent), word/number games (11.4 percent) and casino games (7.6 percent).