The big hitters of UK mobile gaming 2007 revealed

It's fair to say there aren't many public stats available on the best selling mobile games – certainly not in comparison with other gaming platforms, where weekly sales figures are a given.

One of the few reliable sources is games body ELSPA's monthly mobile games chart, with the caveat that it only lists the top ten titles in order (with no figures). However, it tends to come out a month or two after the actual month covered, but it does cover sales through all the main UK operators: 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

So, we thought we'd do some analysis on all the ELSPA charts available from 2007 (January to October) to find out which games were best-sellers in the UK, which publishers had the most hits, and what the split was between branded and unbranded games.

Our methodology went like this: for every monthly chart, we gave ten points to the No.1 game, nine points to the No.2, eight points to the No.3 and so on, right down to one point for the No.10. Then we did some number crunching on the results.

It's not hugely scientific (the top game in the chart doesn't necessarily sell ten times as many downloads as the tenth title), but it makes for an instructive exercise nonetheless, particularly when you see which games and publishers don't feature at all.

It's not a huge surprise that Deal or No Deal is top by some distance: it was ever-present in the ELSPA chart in 2007, and snagged the top spot six times in the ten months we've analysed (and never charted lower than No.4).

Tetris appears in two guises – interestingly, the original seems to have seen off the newer Tetris Mania – while Worms manages the same double appearance trick.

THE PUBLISHERS
In total, 41 games appeared on the ELSPA chart during the first ten months of 2007, from a total of 12 publishers. However, that's put into context when you consider that only four of them had more than two games appear in the chart over the course of the year:

We're loath to shout about Gameloft being the 'Top Publisher of 2007' based on this analysis alone – EA and Glu had more hits, after all – but it does clearly show how UK sales on the operator portals are now dominated by those three publishers, whatever order you put them in.

Indeed, each of them scored more points in the ten months we've analysed than the 4th to 12th ranked publishers put together.

Meanwhile, there's no place on this chart at all for the likes of Digital Chocolate, Hands-On Mobile, RealArcade, Vivendi Games Mobile, or Disney Mobile. Again, we should stress, this doesn't represent pure sales or revenue, but just appearances on the ELSPA chart and our special Pocket Gamer methodology.

THE BRANDS
Our last bit of analysis focused on the source material for the 41 games that appeared on the ELSPA chart during this period. It's clear that branded mobile games still dominate - 37 out of the 41 (or 90 per cent) were based on existing brands, with just four being original mobile IP. Here's the breakdown:

So, it seems mobile gamers like playing games based on… other games, or on TV shows and movies. These two categories were by far the biggest sellers on the UK operator portals, although some publishers would argue the main reason is that these are the type of games that operators promote heavily.

Check the performance of the original-IP mobile puzzlers, though. There may have been only four of them, but they did better than sports stars, board games and casual web titles – not least in their impressive number of points. For the record, the four were Brain Genius, Bubble Bash, Diamond Rush and Brain Challenge.

So there you have it, an overview of what sold and what didn't sell in the UK in 2007 (January to October, at least). Oh, and one more stat for you: Out of those 41 charting games, 36 have been reviewed by Pocket Gamer, with an average score of 7.2.

Overall, then, the quality of the most popular mobile games seems to be pretty good. That said, we wish some of our top-scoring games had done better – sadly, there was no chart success for killer titles like SolaRola, Playman Extreme Running, Might and Magic II, Cafe Solitaire, Pyramid Bloxx, Chuzzle Mobile, or Critter Crunch.