Insights from Spil Games on Mobile and Gaming in Asia

Thanks to Serkan Toto (@serkantoto on Twitter) for pointing out this talk from Spil Games entitled The State of HTML5 Games in Asia. Of course this will be of interest for game developers with their sights set on Asia, but I thought there were a few key factoids in here worth sharing about the mobile market in general. Spil doesn’t mention sources for their numbers, but given that these metrics are critical for their own business, I’m inclined to trust them.

Perhaps most notable are the statistics given for mobile and 3G users in Asia. As we’ve stated many times, China’s mobile numbers are pretty well off the charts with 900 million mobile users. But China still has less 3G users than neighboring Japan (4 percent penetration in China versus ’97 or 98 percent’ in Japan) due to the difference in network infrastructure, which makes the two markets very different as Chen Qi explains in the talk.

They also touch on smartphone market share, and for Japan, this is a number I’ve been trying to find reliable figures on for a while. Again, I’m not sure of its source, but Spil says smartphone market share is about 10-15 percent, with over 10 million users in Japan.

Also of note was the comparison of DeNA’s ARPU in comparison to Facebook and Zynga. You’ll see in their slide that DeNA has an estimated 30 times more revenue per user than Facebook and 15 times more than Zynga. We can’t vouch for those numbers, but Japanese companies have always been good at milking money from mobile users.

But for all this and even more about mobile and gaming in Asia, be sure to check out the entire talk from Spil Games below, which runs about 43 minutes.