Mobango, the app store owned by the People Group, which also runs Shaadi.com, has reported that about 8,000 new game developers signed up on the app store and more than 15,000 games were uploaded on Mobango during the year 2012. Overall, the app store reported 85 million game downloads, and about 28% of all downloads on the app store were games, while rest were either other apps and videos.
According to the company, action and racing games were the most downloaded game genre, followed by games in adventure, arcade and strategy. Note that, the graph below only includes number of downloads and does not represent number of hours spent on each category by the users.
Other highlights:
– The top handset brands for Android platform in terms of downloads on Mobango were Samsung, HTC, Sony and LG. While for Java platform, Nokia, Samsung and Sony devices delivered the most downloads.
– Devices that were medium in size (screen size above 240 pixels in either dimension but below 400 pixels in either dimension) were the highest downloaders of games by a huge margin. Medium size devices also accounted for nearly 40% of visits on Mobango, their contribution to game downloads was almost 60% of all downloads on Mobango.
India is more of a feature phone market and only moving to smartphone devices now, Pushkar Chitale (DGM – Product & Developer Community at Mauj) in an email interaction with MediaNama informs us that “only 5% of phones in India are Android, but nearly 30% of traffic from India on Mobango is from Android. It is high because we choose to focus on Android. Of the 15,000 games that are published on Mobango in 2012, over 75% were android games – which was a huge platform shift which we did not see in the prior year. ”
– However, the story differs when it comes to engagement post download. Android engagement is similar to Java devices however, when it comes to medium or larger devices, Android engagement outstrips Java devices significantly. Large screen devices on Android have higher engagement with the games (about 70% more than Java devices) per download.
Speaking from Mobango’s perspective, Chitale informs us that the number of java game downloads have dropped as Mobango choose to drive Android adoption. This may not be reflective of the broader Indian market or the VAS driven market where the total games business has only expanded aggressively over the last year. Apart from that, he also mentions that the opportunities for java developers to monetize their games through ads is also limited as not many large ad platforms effectively support Java. For instance, Google does not support java platform through SDKs etc. It is largely left to smaller ad networks Globally. This is also a huge driver for developers to move to Android platform.
Mogambo hasn’t yet responded to questions on their user base in India, monetization of their app store in India, telco deals in India, and whether they are profitable.
