Mobile gaming has been a mainstream phenomenon for some time already, yet its popularity is now reaching truly unprecedented heights, with a new study suggesting this popular pasttime is officially more popular than social networks as of recently, at least in the United States.
Authored by mobile advertising company Tapjoy, the study reveals American consumers would now much rather give up social networking than their favorite Android and iOS games, suggesting interactive entertainment on the go is popular across pretty much every genre and withing every demographic. The third iteration of the Modern Mobile Gamer Personas report reveals just how strong the momentum generated by this entertainment industry is currently generating.
Over half of all mobile gamers in the U.S. play interactive titles on their smartphones and tablets for at least an hour per day, whereas just as many of them are parents. 63-percent of respondents picked for Tapjoy’s representative sample identified as women, 28-percent as men, and the rest prefered not to answer the question. Three out of four launch games no fewer than three times per daym whereas nearly half do so between five and ten times every 24 hours, according to the report.
While no single genre is considered obsolete, some are performing better than others; role-playing games, strategies, and puzzlers are currently the most popular types of interactive entertainment on the Google Play Store and Apple’s iOS App Store.
One particularly significant finding that has already been hinted at by previous reports has to do with user engagement in the context of promotional messaging. According to Tapjoy, 41-percent of mobile gamers are likely to pay attention to any sort of advertising while playing, whereas conventional ads are much less efficient; online, magazine, and billboard ads only manage to attract some 15-percent of the audience exposed to them and are much more likely to be viewed as intrusive and annoying.
On the other hand, mobile gamers in general tend to be more understanding of the role ads play in their entertainment, i.e. allow them to experience it free of charge, the study found. Perhaps the most surprising finding outlined in the new report is that nearly three out of four mobile gamer said they actually enjoy interacting with ads, so long as doing so yields in-game currency. They view that activity as a fair transaction that allows them to directly support the creators of games they enjoy while simultaneously allowing them to continue that experience at no direct monetary cost to them.
This unique proposition is the main reason why mobile gaming continues to be viewed as a fitting platform for pushing promotional messages. The segment also contributed to the popularity of gaming as a whole; 60-percent of Americans who use their smartphones for playing now publicly identify as “gamers,” whereas only a quarter of them was willing to do so a year and a half ago.
In essence, mobile gaming is not only responsible for this form of entertainment’s popularity growth among women but is also normalizing digital marketing, which is something many other products and services tried and failed at in the past.