Mobile Gaming, Licensing Vs Original IP—NPD Group
- Posted by James Quintana Pearce
- Thu 22 Mar 2007 03:30 PM
NPD Group
has released some figures for mobile game usage in the US, showing
incremental growth. One thing that stood out is a chart of the
top-selling mobile games for the second half of 2006 (below), and
whether they were based on licensed brands or original IP.
Click here for the table.
As can be seen they’re all licensed brands. Even those that are
original IP are licensed for mobile—by which I mean that the games were
not created for the mobile platform but ported from somewhere else.
Sure, Namco owns the original IP for Pac Man, but in all other respects
it behaves like a licensed brand. As NPD writes: “It was not whether
the games are licensed or based on original intellectual property (IP)
that made the games popular, but rather consumer brand awareness of the
game title”. This is a clear demonstration of why mobile game
developers and publishers (and carriers) often go after
licenses—whatever problems the licenses have and create, there’s a very
strong argument that they increase sales of a game. Of course, it
should also be noted that most of the games on the top-10 list are
“casual” style.
NPD has some other stats for the mobile games market in the US. While 20 percent of mobile users played games on their handset only a bit less than 4 percent downloaded a mobile game in Q4, up from just over 3 percent in the second quarter of 2006. The biggest challenge for the industry is showing mobile game players the value of downloading mobile games. There was nearly $107 million in mobile game-related revenue in the fourth quarter of 2006, according to NPD, which was beaten only by SMS ($482 million) and ringtone downloads ($172 million). The average sale price for mobile games was $3.79, although when free games are taken out of the equation the average sale price rose to $4.41.