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.
The marketplace in India is starting to experience the same level of “app fatigue” being seen elsewhere.
A recent study conducted by Forrester Research in India has shown that consumers will be spending a growing amount of time on their devices, but will be using fewer apps, with a preference for mobile gaming over other types of applications.
The app fatigue that is being seen in other regions of the world is clearly setting in within this country.
This trend has been especially notable in developed markets such as the United States, and Forrester Research stated that it will not take over as quickly in India for a while. The report was entitled “Predictions 2015: Most Brands Will Under-invest In Mobile”. It showed that while device users in India may be showing signs of app fatigue, their love of mobile gaming remained strong.
The report showed that mobile gaming will be, to some extent be immune to the upcoming wave of app fatigue.
The report indicated that smartphone apps are going to start to become less popular among Indian mobile device users, but at the same time, mobile games will start to increase in popularity, to a certain degree. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the average smartphone owner will use an average of 24 apps every month, but 80 percent of their time will be spent on only five of those, as a result of app fatigue.
According to iVoice Ventures’s Venky Vaiyapuri, though many smartphone users are downloading applications, many of those apps will go unused. There are also many applications that remain entertaining only when they are new and that become boring over time. Vaiyapuri explained that there are simply too many apps and this is not appealing to consumers.
He used Angry Birds as an example. While many people download that mobile gaming application, not many will use it or will continue to use it over time. He stated that “We will soon follow the US and UK markets and lose interest in downloading apps.” A Vodafone India spokesperson added that India hasn’t yet reached the level and energy of monetization seen in developed markets.
