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?

Fishlabs Skewers Greystripe At BBQ Smackdown

I love a little drama (and frankly there ain't enough of it in this space)...so I must say I really enjoyed coverage this morning from PocketGamer & GoMo News of Fishlabs CEO Michael Schade's "Network" moment on the subject of how mobile in-game ad network Greystripe has been performing for them (at a BBQ put on by competitor Smaato...btw). Apparently he's "very frustrated" (and doesn't care if everyone knows it) that Greystripe is not selling all the available inventory in the German developer's games. It looks like a rift has developed between the companies over how important targeted ads are within games...with Schade clearly being of the opinion that targeting matters very little and that the focus needs to be 100% ad fill. To me it seems like striking a balance between relevance & placement to maximize revenue yield from CPM or CPC should be the priority...but what do I know? Clearly Schade is moving on...to his BBQ buddies Smaato.

Anyhoo...the whole kerfuffle got me wondering how much money really gets generated from an ad-supported mobile game. I've always heard from publishers that the revenue was pretty pathetic and that ad-supported was only appropriate for games at the end of their pay per download or subscription fee life cycle. I mean even if a game is downloaded by a million people, played 20times, has a $15 CPM with 70% fill rate it would generate about $200k...and that would probably be the Tetris of ad-supported games. Most publishers could beat this result with a lackluster 100k paid downloads across carriers WW. Ad fill, relevance, does it really matter very much...are ad-supported games worth all this acrimony? Probably not...what I'm guessing is that those Smaato guys just rock better brats and beers than the Greystripe crew. Oh snap!