App Store Accounts For About 9% of Gameloft's Revenue

Tout le monde covered a press release Gamloft distributed yesterday in which it revealed that it had sold over 6 million games on the iTunes App Store (remember that's iPhones & iPod touch) and that "iPhone OS continues to be Gameloft's number one platform." I'm not exactly sure what that last statement means, because clearly Apple's OS can't be bigger than Java (J2ME)...or even BREW for that matter. I think they mean the iPhone (in all its iterations) is the #1 handset for Gameloft games. 6 million sounds like an impressive number...but what does that really mean to Gameloft in terms of revenue? The company said it sold the games so I assume we're only talking about paid downloads here. The average price of a Gameloft game in the US App Store is $2.61...but the average price of the Top 9 sellers that they mention in the release is $4.88 (I will say that Gameloft has been one of the better publishers in terms of fighting price erosion on the platform). So I'm gonna assume that the average selling price of those 6mil games was $3.75. That's $22.5mil retail...which after Apple's 30% is $15.75mil. As reported here Gameloft's revenue for the last 12mos was $172.56mil, which would mean the App Store accounted for 9.1% of its revenue. Considering that Gameloft is probably the 2nd most successful publisher on the App Store I think there is an important lesson here for all mobile game publishers, which is... Apple is good for mobile games, Apple is important for mobile games, but Apple is not the only game town.