Industry analyst Gartner has released its latest report on the mobile game market, predicting that it'll globally generate $4.5 billion of revenues this year, a 16.1 per cent rise from last year.
By 2011, meanwhile, it's predicting that mobile games will be generating $6.3 billion of revenues. This is worldwide user spending.
Breaking that down, Gartner predicts Asia/Pacific will be the biggest region for mobile games, growing from $2.3 billion this year to $3.4 billion by 2011. North America is next, going from $845 million to $1.2 billion in the same period.
Meanwhile, Western Europe will lag behind a bit, growing from a predicted $701 million this year to $862 million by 2011.
So how accurate are these figures?
EA Mobile reckons its global mobile game revenues will be $185 million in its current fiscal year, running from this April to next March.
Glu has predicted GAAP revenue of between $96.5 million and $100 million for 2008, while Gameloft is aiming for growth of 25-30 per cent on its 2007 figure of 96.1 million (i.e. somewhere between $188 million and $197 million).
Taking the upper end of those predictions (ignore EA's different business year for a moment), that means the three companies are aiming for combined 2008 revenues of $482 million.
If we use a generous estimate that operators are taking 50 per cent of all these publishers' downloads, that means consumer spending of around $964 billion on the mobile games of the three largest publishers.
Subtract that from Gartner's 2008 prediction of $4.5 billion (with a bit of rounding) and you're left with $3.5 billion being spent this year on other companies' games.
That's a helluva longtail right there. Even if a big chunk of those missing revenues come from Asia/Pacific.
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Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)
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