Report: Mobile Users Downloading More Free Games, Fewer Paid Games

A new report on the state of the mobile gaming market shows that, while mobile games are more popular than ever, people are paying for those games less and less often. Across both the U.S. and Britain, 33.6 percent of people polled play mobile games at least once a month, while 24.6 percent play weekly, according to a Cellular News survey cited in a recent Ayzenberg white paper. Most of those players seem unwilling to pay for their mobile game downloads, however. A December 2010 ComScore report cited by Ayzenberg shows only 37 percent of all mobile games are downloaded for an upfront fee, a decline of 17 percentage points from the year before. The proportional change represents an 11 percent drop in purchases of paid mobile games and a 67 percent increase in full, free mobile game downloads from 2009 to 2010, according to the same report. "This change in behavior speaks to a larger trend in the mobile app community where the real value of application content is not necessarily in a transaction to acquire the app, but in the potential advertising revenue this type of targeted reach could bring," Ayzenberg argues. The Ayzenberg report also points out that iPod Touch users are more active app consumers than their mobile phone counterparts, spending roughly 26.5 percent more time using apps daily and downloading 37.5 percent more apps monthly.