Survey from PopCap shows increase in mobile gaming

A new survey from PopCap shows a third of all mobile phone users in the UK and USA have played a game in the past month, and a quarter have played in the past week. Before the introduction of smartphones like the iPhone, game-playing usage hovered around 5 percent. The increase has come due to the much easier availability of games in Apple's App Store, which outsold all similar online stores several times over last year, and the huge popularity of games like Angry Birds.

Exactly 33.6 percent played a game in the past month -- played, not bought, however. 24.6 percent played in the past week, and 19 percent daily. Unfortunately, the survey doesn't break this down between handset models, and it only talks about "Smartphone[s], e.g., iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry or PDA." However, iPhones probably take up a very large portion of gaming users.

43 percent of mobile game players have bought a paid version of a free trial game, and 27 percent paid for additional content. While the average mobile phone gamer bought 2.9 games in 2010 for US$15.70, for smartphone gamers this almost doubles to 5.4 games costing $25.57.