33% of US and UK Adults are Mobile Gamers

A new survey from PoCap, the makers of Plants vs Zombies, Bejeweled 3, and Feeding Frenzy, shows an incredible percentage of adults from U.K. and U.S. are strongly into mobile gaming. Due to the recent growth of Android and iOS, over 31% of Americans own a smartphone. In the US research 52% of 2,425 respondents, have stated that they have played a mobile game on their friends or own device. The survey gathered 2,425 respondents, of those 73% were from U.K. and 44% from U.S. The most engaging part of the survey was that 83% of smartphone-owners said they had played at least one mobile game in the past week. Unlike the console market, where the male gamers are dominant over females, there is no much of a gap between mobile female and male gamers. The survey mentions that smartphone users spend $25.57  a year, compared to $15.70 from feature phone owners. Check out the other stats from the press release:

* 84% of all mobile phone gamers, and 97% of avid mobile phone gamers say they play games on their phone at least once a week; 92% of smartphone owners who play mobile games say they play at least once a week, and 45% say they play daily (compared to 35% of all mobile phone gamers). In the 2009 survey, only 13% of mobile phone gamers said they played daily, and 40% said they played weekly or more often. * Among all mobile phone gamers, 50% said that the amount of time they spend playing games on their handset has increased over the past year, and among smartphone owners the figure climbs to 63%; in the 2009 survey, only 20% of mobile gamers indicated their consumption of mobile games had increased. * Among all mobile phone gamers, 78% indicated that playing mobile phone games had become a regular part of their weekly activities, and more than half (59%) indicated that they saw such games as a regular part of their daily activities; for smartphone owners the figures were 84% and 68%, respectively. * When asked which gaming-capable device they play games on most often, 44% of mobile phone gamers chose their phones, catapulting handsets past video game consoles (21%) and computers (30%) to the top of the list. 51% of avid mobile gamers and 55% of those mobile gamers who own smartphones indicated they played games most often on their phones. This compares to just 17% of mobile gamers who chose their handset as their most frequently used gaming device in the 2009 survey. * 43% of all mobile gamers, and 49% of smartphone gamers, said they had upgraded a free trial game to the full (paid) version in the past year; more than a quarter (27%) of all mobile gamers, and a third (34%) of smartphone gamers, said they had paid for additional content for an originally free game in the past year. * Among mobile phone gamers, the average smartphone owner purchased nearly twice as many games as those with other types of phones (5.4 games vs. 2.9 games) in 2010, and spent almost $10 more ($25.57 vs. $15.70) on phone games. * 19% of all mobile phone gamers said they played one or more social networking games via their phone daily, and more than a third (37%) said they play a social networking game via their phone at least once a week. * Among all mobile phone gamers, 23% of all mobile phone device usage time (excluding phone calls) is spent playing games.

Bottom Line: With these encouraging stats, mobile gaming development will be growing rapidly in the next few years. Kind of like gaming consoles, i feel that in the future we will have exclusive games for different mobile software devices. For example, Apple paying Rovio to create Angry Birds for only iOS devices.

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