A new report from Juniper Research forecasts global mobile games revenues to surpass $11 billion by 2015, nearly double what they were in 2009.
All in all, it’s a fairly conservative prediction in my opinion, but what’s interesting is that the research firm also says in-game purchases will overtake the traditional pay-per-download model, with Apple’s in-app billing mechanism leading the way, as the primary source of monetizing mobile games in about two years (by 2013).
At the same time, Juniper Research acknowledges that, with the ever-increasing amount of apps on all popular platforms (and app stores for that matter), discoverability remains a problem for game developers and publishers alike.
Sounds like an interesting time to be a mobile games developer or publisher, although this quote from the report’s author, Daniel Ashdown, should serve as a big red warning flag:
“Discoverability can be a ‘chicken and egg’ problem: high downloads lead to prominence, but achieving a high number of downloads is largely dependent on already being prominent.
Consequently, a small minority of games achieve very high downloads, whilst the vast majority achieve very small download figures.”
This is obviously an excellent opportunity for fledgling app discovery platforms such as Appsfire, Chomp, Mplayit, AppAware, Appolocious and, increasingly, StumbleUpon.
Awkward “video white paper” / interview below: