Wireless measurement firm Telephia recently reported that 30% of mobile games provided 80% of the industry revenue in their latest study. It's not a huge surprise due to the problems in marketing a large set of games on a mobile deck, so people naturally gravitate to games they know or which can be described in one sentence. Nor was it a suprise that Jamdat's recently acquired Tetris was the top game - otherwise, $137M would have been a lot to pay for it.
However, the first surprise is that 9 of the top 10 games were of the general casual variety, either Puzzle, Card or Trivia - so no sports or shooters, and only one fantasy game. The second and bigger surprise is that the #4 and #5 games were both mobile versions of PC casual games, in this case PopCap's Bejeweled and PopCap's Zuma. So in spite of all of the talk about how big brands matter most in mobile, and how there are supposedly no brands in casual games, 2 of the top 5 games in all mobile gaming are from the PC casual game world - looks like there are multiple ways to build brands, and that there are multiple distribution channels for successful casual games.
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