Thursday, September 17, 2009

Ovi Store US Top 25 Paid Mobile Games

I have to admit something. I ♥ Nokia. I think they make a lot of cool devices (likey N-series a lot), I admire their willingness to experiment and I've met legions of smart, charming people (whose names I can't pronounce) from the company. Now this admission may come as a surprise to y'all given my propensity to regularly take the stuffing out of them in my posts. Well, that's only because I believe that Nokia is failing to live up to its potential in terms of the content services they've created and in terms of their current US marketshare. Let's call it tough love.

OK, now that that's out of the way... as you've probably noticed I've recently been running a series of surveys of the top mobile games titles in the various app stores. Thursday evening I decided to take a gander at Nokia's Ovi Store. I told the online version of the store that my handset was an N95, figuring I'd go with a top-end handset that's been around for a while (one for which I knew there were lots of available games). Within the store I selected Games > Most Popular > Paid. If I had to use one word to describe the result it would have to be... random! To begin with, how is it possible in the US version of this store that the 7th & 8th most popular titles are cricket games? Also, why are the top-tier publishers so poorly represented (EA...Tetris....Bueller)? These guys have games available on the site (Gameloft has 43), but with a couple of exceptions (notably PopCap's Bejeweled), they're not showing up on the top of the Most Popular list. Three of the most prominently featured companies are names I've literally never come across before, like Kooky Panda (#2 game), Mobi2Fun (5 games!) and ZingMagic (10 games!)... and most of their titles look kinda bootleg (though Omar Sharif Bridge has gotta be the shiznit). I have three theories about what's going on here: 1) The numbers are so small that ranking is meaningless; 2) Everyone who owns an N95 in the US is a cricket-mad expat that wants to play cards with Omar Sharif; 3) Data fail. Any other theories out there?

4 comments:

  1. Beer came out of my nose I laughed so hard on this one! Please figure out how to make an a$$ load of money on this blog, it is truely a joy to read

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  2. Hey Jeremy,

    Do you know if any of these games work on S60 5th edition?

    /Mark

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  3. @Mark -- not sure about the specific versions available on the Ovi store (it doesn't provide that detail), but for instance ZingMagic does make versions of some of these titles (e.g. Chess Pro II) for both S60 3rd & 5th editions

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