Top 10 iPhone gaming statistics

Gamers love their stats, whether it's Halo 3 frag counts, Football Manager player attributes, or the 83,768 planes that some jammy bugger has managed to land in Flight Control.

Yes, we did make that last stat up. But it's only a matter of time.

Anyway, over on PocketGamer.biz, we've been digging into some stats about the iPhone gaming market. Want some edited highlights? You know you do...

1. At last week's WWDC, Apple said it has now sold more than 40 million iPhones and iPod touch devices globally. The last time it split those out was in March, when it had sold 17 million iPhones and 13 million iPod touches.

2. According to Gartner, Apple doubled its share of the smartphone market from 5.4 per cent in 2007 to 10.8 per cent in 2008.

3. Screen Digest claims that iPhone was responsible for 10 per cent of US and Canadian mobile game sales in 2008 - around $100 million in revenue. Meanwhile, in February, comScore claimed that iPhone accounted for 14 per cent of all people who downloaded a mobile game.

4. A survey conducted by Compete in April 2009 found that 83 per cent of iPhone owners have downloaded at least six apps, but claimed they tend to spend a bit less on average on individual applications.

5. In February Mobclix claimed that 76.7 per cent of iPhone games are paid, while 23.3 per cent are free. Puzzle games were by far the biggest category, accounting for 19.1 per cent of iPhone games. The next most popular genres were Arcade (21.6 per cent), Action (20.8 per cent) and Family (15.9 per cent).

6. This month, Nielsen estimated that nearly 75 per cent of US iPhone users are downloading applications, and that a whopping 98 per cent are using the handset's data features.

7. Nielsen also found that the largest age group was 35-54 year-olds, who account for 36 per cent of owners. The 55+ group even outweighs 18- to 24-year-olds.

8. comScore estimates that in January 2009, 37 per cent of UK iPhone owners downloaded a game, with 18.6 per cent actually paying to do so.

9. Research from Brightkite and Gfk in May 2009 suggested that iPhone owners are nearly twice as likely to remember seeing adverts within games than non-iPhone owners. Specifically, 7.1 per cent of iPhone users surveyed remembered seeing ads in games, versus 3.7 per cent of non-iPhone users.

10. In May 2009, Lightspeed Venture Partners did some calculations based on the first billion iPhone app downloads, estimating that they had generated total revenues of between $70 and $160 million, based on only 25-60 million of those billion downloads being paid for, at a median price of $2.65.
So there you have it. For the full PocketGamer.biz feature, click here. It's got pretty graphs and everything.