Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 2, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The mobile gaming market continues its growth trajectory. According to a current report by US market research company DFC Intelligence, the sector will reach a total market volume of 11.7 billion dollars by 2014. This corresponds to growth of around eight percent compared with the comparable figure from 2008. The driving force, however, will not be conventional portable video game consoles, but primarily games for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices.
“Dedicated portable video game systems will not disappear completely. But Apple will be the most important engine of growth,” DFC analyst David Cole explains to the Wall Street Journal. Devices such as Nintendo DS and Sony PSP would still account for the majority of mobile-games revenue in 2014, at 6.3 billion dollars. Compared with 2008, however, revenues in this sector would then have fallen by a full 27 percent. “During the same period, revenues from the iPhone and iPod touch will soar from 46 million to 2.8 billion dollars,” Cole predicts.
Apple Devices Partly Superior to Consoles
The current DFC report is not the first analysis to confirm that Apple devices are well on their way to becoming the dominant mobile gaming platforms. Neil Young, founder of iPhone game studio Ngmoco, had already stated in March at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco that the iPhone was already clearly superior to its console competitors in some areas.
“The iPhone and iPod touch certainly have the potential to develop into serious competitors for Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable in the long term,” Eugen Knippel, Marketing Director at games publisher Ubisoft Austria, tells pressetext.de. At present, however, the pressure on Nintendo and Sony is not yet so strong. “In terms of technical equipment and graphics performance, however, the iPhone and iPod touch are already superior to their console competitors,” Knippel states.
Nokia Discontinues N-Gage Platform
Mobile-phone manufacturer Nokia is currently having to acknowledge that even the booming mobile gaming market offers no guarantee of success. The Finnish company, whose N-Gage device designed specifically for games found little support among consumers, recently announced that it would no longer release new games for its own platform. These would also remain available only until the end of September 2010.
