Solo Project I Android Dominates in Mobile OS market and mostly free mobile games have been preferred.

By Sadettin Demirel

The game has been both an instrument and result of human being’s entertainment, learning, discovering’s processes since the earliest times . People’s endless creativity and fun desires have enriched concept of game and it has become a sector that has enormous gaining nowadays.

Here I searched into mobile game sector where addictive, fascinating games have been created recently.

“Game Industry Has Evolved with Mobile Technologies”

More space and features demands of consumers turned mobile device developers to make smartphones have bigger display and memory size. The new concept of phone design and features have been replaced clamshell and push button phone with touch screen smartphones have superior camera quality and various features like browsing, mailing, location and and finally gaming. Also display size is one of the most features to buy a mobile device in today’s world. As an example, apple has changed designing and marketing strategy of IPhone which was one of the first pioneer phone when it launched. In 2012 when iPhone 5 was released, apple emphasized one hand controlled phone and underestimate large screen sized smartphones, because iphone 5’s display size was smaller than  some of android smartphones. In 2014 the brand changed its marketing and design strategy and released bigger display sized iPhone ever, because of the larger display sized phone brands have dominated the market.

Of course not just display size but also hardware and software developments that can compete with notebook and desktop computers have important roles on evolution of mobile game market. As a result of these, mobile devices became the driving force of gaming industry.

According to Newzoo Research Company’s report in 2015, market volume of digital gaming sector was $ 91 Billion, where as market size of mobile sector was $ 26 Billion in first quarter of 2014. Also, the estimated growth of mobile market is $ 40 billion in 2017 according to the same report.

“Turkey’s market volume has been predicted as $ 200 Million in 2020”  

According to Newzoo Global Games Market Report in 2015, Turkey is ranked as 16th in list of top 100 countries ranked on global game revenue estimates for 2015 in descending order.

Also Newzoo 2013 report on digital gaming market in Turkey showed that there are 22,5 million gamers that are between 16  and 50 ages. while 15 Million of them played game via desktop or notebook devices, 16,5 million gamers of them also preferred mobile devices to play game.

According to Google 2015 Consumer Barometer data, while percentage of smartphone usage in Turkey was 14 % in 2012, the rate increased dramatically in 2015.

The same research also indicates that the 53 % of people, use smartphone, play game through their mobile devices in Turkey. The same rate is 50 % in China, 39 % in USA, 29 % in UK. So half population of people who use smartphone is interested in mobile gaming.

In addition, according to digital market data from Statista.com, Turkey’s mobile game sector size increased rapidly from $93 million in 2014 to $123 million in 2015. If we look at the estimated values of mobile game revenue and and numbers of mobile gamers, we can say that mobile gaming industry has great potential to grow in domestic market.

Even though, the same data indicates that men play games more than women if we look at gender distribution of mobile gamers in Turkey, it is estimated that the number of gamers will be increase from 2016 to 2020 for both gender.

it seems that various age groups have an interest with mobile gaming but the young and middle age population are the predominant age groups for mobile gaming in Turkey. The number of players will rise year after year for all age groups according to Statista’s age distribution data of mobile game market in Turkey

As a result, in the light of these findings, we can say that there are vibrant target audiences that are interested with mobile games in Turkey and also Volume of Mobile gaming market has been expanded gradually in both Turkey and worldwide.

However, although the statistics of mobile game market in Turkey and world is supported by three different sources, I believe that these sources’ basis on mostly estimated values and predictions. In order to get detailed and first hand information and also make right inferences , I did a humble quantitative research focuses on mobile gaming habits and preferences of Public Relations and New Media students in Kadir Has University.

I used survey data gathering technique and I got interesting findings about mobile game market and native mobile gamers. (There were 13 questions and the survey answered by 120 participants. Also the survey was made between Dec 15 and Dec 17 through Google Form tool.) 

While 106 people of total participants are between 15 and 35 ages, 14 people are just 35 – 50 age range.

There are more male participants joined the survey than female participants.

85% of participants say yes, but 15% of them state as no for this question.

“The android rules over the OS market and free games are most preferable ones”

70% of sample size is using Android OS while 29.7% of them are using IOS

Likewise, Android OS dominated the OS market in not only this finding but also worldwide. The comparison data from International Data Centre (IDC) indicates android has biggest share on mobile OS market even tough there are tiny changes on percentage value.

Participants have spent mostly 1 or 2 hours as average in a day to play mobile games.

Another question reflected that the participants choose mostly free games and well known mobile games like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans

Only 38% of participants paid for mobile game in their life which is not a surprising finding because of the fact that participants generally prefer free mobile games.

“The participants don’t have enough awareness level for native mobile game Industry”

 Interestingly 85% of them say that they know native mobile game developers and follow them.

Although 85% of participants, which mean 102 participants, know native game developers, only 43 people answered the “Please write down a native mobile game you know? question. It seems there is an inconsistency here, because despite that fact that 102 participants know native developers, only 43 of them wrote down a native mobile game name.

We can say that there is no sufficient level of awareness on both native game developers and their mobile games in the light of these findings.

Also the majority of participants who answered the question marked down mostly puzzle, arcade and race games like 1010!, Managuan, Traffic Racer

All in All, there are both vivid male and female mobile gamers that are between 15 and 35 ages in Turkey. These gamers that use Android OS more than IOS and Windows OS generally spends 1 or 2 hours in a day for gaming and prefers usually free and well-known, foreign mobile games. Unfortunately, level of awareness about native mobile games in Turkey is not satisfying because only 35% of participants have sufficient awareness. In my opinion the biggest problem of native game Industry is lack of awareness in Turkey.

What is the situation of native initiatives?

There are native mobile games that reached high downloading and rating numbers on both Google Play and iTunes Play Store. However native developers follow different sale strategies for each platform. While the developers offer their games direct sale options on iTunes, the same games are launched with freemium offers on Google Play Store.

In order to understand and analyze domestic mobile game market accurately, I created a catalog includes native mobile games basis on their downloading and total rating statistics on Google Play. I did it for only Google Play because there is no open and usable data about mobile applications on iTunes.

Native Mobile games by download and rating statistics

I examined Top 25 native mobile game on Google Play. If we look at the download numbers, Traffic Racer is ranked 1 with 100 million downloads and Real Basketball, Manuganu and 1010! games follow. Especially traffic racer’s download statistic seems very promising for the future of domestic mobile market.

Another criteria is rating. Gamers rate game or application from 1 to 5 stars on Google Play. Whereas bottom value  means “hated it”, ” peak value stand for “liked it”. So to be able to compare games’ ratings I include both numbers of 1 and 5 stars and total votes to native mobile games’ dataset. The bar chart shows that most of games are liked more than they are hated by gamers. I think it is very important finding because if gamers liked a developer’s game app, they will definitely dig another works of it. so that the developers can create their loyal target audiences.

when we classify Top 25 mobile games, particularly table, puzzle and action games are more than other categories. Most likely these games draws more attention than others.

As developers Peak Games and Mobile Craft dominates the list and they have more mobile games than other developers. However, there are individual developers like Alper Sarıkaya and Soner Kara who try to compete with these native companies in domestic market.

Consequently, there are vibrant and dynamics target audiences, different kinds of games and various domestic initiatives for mobile games market in Turkey. On the other hand, if we make a list by comparing the native initiatives with foreign multinational game companies in terms of highest level awareness and games’ revenues, native developers will be bottom of the list because multinational developers adopt themselves to consumer’s demands. They launched pc and console quality mobile games when native developers still produces puzzle and arcade games. Also Turkey is ranked as 7th at worldwide in the statistics of downloading application. It seems that Turkey is again consumer position more than producer in the mobile games industry as usual and this is a very serious issue that can damage the domestic market for native developers.

Actually this is a multidimensional issue because it is related with government’s policies, private sector, investment strategies and of course education opportunities that focused mobile trends.
I believe that main reason of this problems are lack of government policies and absence of pressure non-governmental groups, because there is no database or open data that evaluates and analyze domestic developers in Turkey even though there is no specific government policy that encourages and supports developers to increase circulation in mobile games market. Hence to improve native developers, government should support them with financial aids and encourage the candidates to produce more application and mobile games. Also more NGO’s that cooperate with developers, facilitate their works and put pressure on the government to support sector should be established immediately.