July 31st, 2007
Games distributor: BlackBerry users more active mobile gamers than regular cell subscribers
GamesOnDeck offers an interview with Magmic Games CEO John Criswick as well as Magmic distributor Bplay’s Vice President Nicholas Reichenbach.
Why should you care? Well, together, Magmic as developer and Bplay as portal, are responsible for some 75% of the mobile games business on BlackBerry’s platform. That equates to games played by between 760,000 and 800,000 active BlackBerry users /gamers worldwide.
The interview touches on the differences of developing for BlackBerry as opposed to other mobile handset platforms, and what the hot BlackBerry-compatible games there are right now in Magmic’s portfolio. Two are mentioned: Texas Hold ‘Em King Poker 2 (some 75,000 BlackBerry users) and Ka-Glom (pictured at top left of this post.
Next, comes stats that claim BlackBerry users are more intense gamers than regular cellphone users.
“…if we look at some statistics, BlackBerry users have a 6-7% penetration on mobile games, while feature phones have only 2-3%. So 6-7% of all BlackBerry users play games. I think it’s because they’re network enabled devices, and people spend a lot of time on them, it’s an extension of people’s business and personal lives in their hands.”
Now given BlackBerry’s image as a device mainly for business users, that’s interesting.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
