Fishlabs, the German high-end 3D studio have long been one of my favourite developers (see here for a previous post). And with the ascent of the iPhone also appears to come the rapid rise to fame for them. Today, they have released numbers on one of their latest advergames, which they did for Barclaycard. For those not familiar: Barclaycard runs a large advertising campaign where a guy slides on a water slide through the city buying stuff whilst passing through markets, shops, etc. It took me a while to understand it (even though I am one of their customers) but it is to promote their new RFID-enabled credit cards.
Fishlabs produced an iPhone game for this (aptly called “Waterslide Extreme”). Interestingly, other than a Barclaycard logo on the main menu screen, I could not (yet) find any mention of the brand. Anyhow, Barclaycard seems to be super-happy as Fishlabs now has reported a whopping 2m downloads in one (!) week, which have generated 16m “engagement minutes”, presumably meaning that players engaged with the brand.
The – free – game is said to top the iPhone download charts in no less than 57 countries, including all the biggies like the US (where, reportedly, 54% of iPhone and iPod Touch users reside), the UK and Germany.
I just wonder if this is such good marketing (and I am not an advocate for unwanted in-your-face advertising at all): one mention of the brand (and very subtly, too) would surely make for only the most discrete of “engagements” with the brand.
So good on Fishlabs! But advertisers might want to consider giving these things a little more thought. Imagine the potential result for the image of the Barclaycard brand if, through a somewhat more thoughtful and smarter brand treatment, all of those 2m users would actually perceive it as a fun goodie brought to them by Barclaycard. Just to think of it… 
It was only a question of time before the first carriers would release themselves from the iPhone-imposed stare and come out all action, and the biggest of them all (by sales), Vodafone, has now raised the curtains on its very own app store. It is the biggest app store to date: Vodafone has more than 289m customers who will – eventually – all be able to access the store (which makes it a cool 8x or so larger than Apple’s). Unlike on Apple’s App Store, you also do not need a credit card (which, however, you are likely to have anyway when you can afford an iPhone) whereas Vodafone, being a carrier, will bill to their customer’s phone bills directly. Very, very cool, huh?
The iPhone has a meagre 1.2% share of the overall phone market. However, it has true worker bees as users. No, honestly, these guys are sooo much busier than everybody else: they produce a whopping 2/3 of the world’s mobile web traffic, or so says a report. Yes, that’s right. Number 2? Shared between open-source-newbie Symbian and – remarkably – Android with 6.15% each, which is, erm, less than 10% of what the iPhone accounts for (and in spite there being a gazillion more Symbian-powered phones out there than iPhones). Next one in the queue then is Blackberry with 2.24%.
Not really mobile but at least digital and interesting in any event: a news release has it that Apple‘s iTunes had overtaken mighty Wal-Mart as the US’ largest retailer of music. Best Buy was ranked third and Amazon.com and Target tied for the fourth spot in January and February, it is reported.
iTunes apparently sold more than 4 billion tracks since its launch in 2003. The survey counted every 12 digital downloads as one CD but excluded mobile music sales. Apple claims more than 50 million customers. This is a rather impressive development: They sold around 25m tracks in 2003, surpassed the 1bn mark only 3 years later and hit 3bn in July2007.
Here‘s some always again interesting finds on mobile game demographics re-confirmed :
29% of all 25-34 year-old US-Americans downloaded mobile games in 2006, and 27% of the 18-24 year-olds but only 15% of 13-17 year-olds. The older folks also play more: 50% of the two older age groups vs 41% of the teens play mobile games on a daily basis.
The picture is naturally somewhat distorted as proportionately more adults own mobile phones than teens (although the latter catch up quickly).
However, considering that, in the UK, the average credit kids have on their pre-paid phones (which most of them have) is a meagre £5, which leaves little to no wiggling space when compared to game prices of £3-5 per pop: they simply don’t have the dough to buy more.
Another re-confirmed suspicion highlights the distribution challenge: 29 million US-Americans play mobile games, only 7 million download them, and that means 22 million play whatever is on their handset – whether it is a good or a bad one. 22 million gamers that do not access all the great games that are out there show that there is a severe disconnect regarding a) discovery and b) marketing and distribution in general. Whilst these will not be the only factors, they are significant.
