Mobile games are used primarily for killing time

Thought this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to many, a study has just confirmed this suspicion.

EEDAR, a video and mobile games research firm, has now released the results of a data analysis it has conducted in order to confirm what many people have suspected about game app use for some time now.

Mobile device owners tend to use their gadgets to play games to pass time, not for the challenge or fun of it.

Though it is not entirely surprising, it remains quite interesting, particularly for developers of mobile games and especially for those creating multiplayer experiences. According to the report from EEDAR, about 74 percent of people in North America who play game apps do so in order to kill time. Twelve percent do so in order to interact with other people while 16 percent do so in order to be able to compete with other propel.

This helps to expand on the insight that was offered by Flurry in a mobile games study conducted last year.

Flurry, an analytics company owned by Yahoo, reported that there had been a notable decline in the average amount of time users were spending on mobile game apps. That report was created in 2015. Simon Khalaf, an exec at Flurry, explained that American mobile game players weren’t spending as much time on those mobile apps as they had bumped up the amount of time they were spending watching other people while they played.

This helped to explain why there had simultaneously been a boost in the amount of time spent on sites such as YouTube and Twitch for watching other people playing games on their consoles, computers and their mobile devices as well.

Patrick Walker, an EEDAR exec, discussed this shift in mobile games trends when he spoke at the GDC 2016 with regards to player engagement. Among the subjects on which he focused was the reason people in North American and Japan were playing these game apps. In Japan, only 5 percent had said that they were playing in order to compete with others, less than a third of the North American statistic.