Top billing with mobile carriers leads to 90% more downloads
Research firm Telephia talks up carrier deck positioning
Positioning mobile games on a carrier's New, Featured or Best Seller decks results in 90 percent more downloads than otherwise, a survey by Telephia has revealed.
The company also said that titles that receive placement elsewhere on the first page of a carrier's deck receive 53 percent more downloads than those that appear on subsequence pages.
In sample data based on US carrier Sprint's "What's Hot" and "What's New" decks, EA Mobile and Gameloft enjoyed the lion's share of coverage in the second half of the year.
"On-deck game downloads accounted for 74 percent of mobile game revenues in Q3 2006. Given the limited real estate on the mobile screen and the difficulty of driving consumer trial, getting top shelf placement is the #1 priority for game publishers," said Kanishka Agarwal, Telephia's vice president of mobile content.
Telephia's data is based on 35,000 passively monitored mobile subscribers, and was collected during the fourth quarter of 2006. The company collects both deck placement and title-level sales data, which it uses to build its "Mobile Game Merchandising" data.
"Our Mobile Game Merchandising product allows game publishers to competitively benchmark their share and quality of shelf space, and directly link it to the sales success of their titles. Our research takes the guesswork out of distribution and marketing mix decisions," Agarwal concluded.