It’s been a while since we had a good old fashioned battle of the mobile operating systems, or more specifically an iOS versus Android head-to-head. The world’s two most popular mobile offerings have both steeped themselves in glory and shame in the past, but a new report seems to show that iOS is leading the way when it comes to gaming revenues.
iPodnn is reporting that United States-based gamers spend up to five times more on gaming on the iOS platform than their Android-based counterparts. The report has been produced using a number of data input sets, including comparison revenue and the total number of downloads taken from the top 200 grossing games, as well as using results generated from a survey involving over 17,000 avid gamers.
Once the data had been accumulated, the figures showed that 84% of the revenue generated by mobile devices belonged to those that ran Apple’s iOS and came from the App Store as opposed to Android’s Google Play Store. Perhaps more interestingly, due to the current widespread debate about pricing structures and the freemium model, both the App Store and Google Play Store generated under a tenth of that revenue through an initial game purchase with the remainder coming from users who purchased upgrades or additional content in-game.
Those announced figures represent the American user-base, with Germany and France based in-app sales landing in at between 73 and 87 percent. The survey doesn’t actually take into account any financials that may have been a result of displaying adverts within the game and focuses purely on initial purchased and in-app checkouts. One figure that will probably be quite encouraging for manufacturers is that 81% of the users involved use a smartphone or a tablet device for their mobile gaming adventures, showing a very high adoption rate of more advanced devices.
So what is the possible reason that Apple is enjoying the lion’s share of the mobile gaming revenue? Well, It is firmly believed that Apple’s iTunes business model of making users register a valid credit card against their account could be playing a large part in this.
In reality the reason could be a lot simpler than that with a lot of users, including myself, preferring the consistent experience that is provided when using an iOS device. Games designed for use on Android often perform differently when used across different devices due to the varying form factors, technical specifications and display resolutions, meaning users could be put off due to the potentially poor user experience.
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