When mobile game developers and other business-minded folks throw around the term "emerging markets," their thoughts almost immediately go to three places: China, Korea, and Japan. For Western developers, these are the markets with the clearest potential for growth - and they're the markets that no Western company has really managed to crack.But what if there was another untapped market eager for developer attention?This year's Live Mobile! European Mobile Congress is being held in Moscow this week (Nov 12 & 13, to be exact); the capital city of a nation that's ravenously eating up the best that mobile gaming has to offer. And as companies like Game Insight are quick to point out, it's home to some chart-topping mobile developers too.To highlight the potential of the Russian marketplace, Game Insight and J'Son & Partners have teamed up to provide this handy infographic - or as we like to call it, a cheat sheet on why you should really be considering translating your latest app into one more language:
As a gamer today in 2013, there are now more ways to play our favorite games than ever before: whether on home consoles, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, or even social media platforms like Facebook. So after popular games creator Arkadium recently announced that the company would be using their latest funds received through Series A financing (a cool $5 million) to invest in cross-platform game development, they decided to take a look at just how gamers habitually use cross-platform gaming capabilities today.Their findings, which encompass a survey through Peanut Labs of 1,500 U.S. gamers above the age of 18 in the second quarter of 2013, provide us with some insightful data about how we, as gamers, tend to play both our favorite mobile and Facebook games. For one thing, 43% of cross-platform gamers were more likely to make an in-app purchase when playing a mobile game, as opposed to the close 38% that made purchases in a Facebook game. It was also found that almost half of those surveyed played 3 or more different mobile games in a single week, while a whopping 56% of surveyed gamers would tend to play more than 3 different Facebook games in a single week's timeframe.The percentage ratios of male to female gamers were more or less equivalent for all categories investigated, and it's also interesting to note that 63% of these cross-platform gamers had been alerted to new Facebook games through a friend's invitation via the popular social network.So there you have it. Do any of these numbers speak to the very same patterns that you yourself tend to be playing in during your favorite mobile and Facebook games? And I guess if there's one thing that's for certain after reading this study, it's that those always "endearing" Facebook requests from friends who are playing games that you've never heard of before, or that you don't necessarily even care about, are going to be here to stay.
Over the last year or so, we've done a fair bit of reporting on the importance of diversification in the casual games market. The days when a developer can rely solely on the profits of PC games, it would seem, have more or less come to an end. PlayFirst seemed to recognize this earlier than anyone else, and quickly jumped into the emerging mobile games market three years ago, putting Diner Dash on the App Store shortly after it first launched.