Adults play more mobile games than teens, says survey

We're all big kids at Pocket Gamer but that isn't to say that mobile games are the exclusive pursuit of young-uns. In fact, a recent study conducted by the NDP Group, a consumer and retail information company, uncovered amongst other things that more than a quarter of mobile games are downloaded by adults between 25 and 34 years old.

Surprisingly, only 15 per cent of games are bought by teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17.

Naturally, if more adults are buying games then they should be playing them more often, too, and indeed half of declared mobile gamers between the ages of 25 and 34 play a game on their mobile device at least once a day.

A lesser 41 per cent of teens exhibited similar behaviour, but this may be due to a fairly obvious factor – money. There simply are not as many teens that have mobile phone subscriptions as adults, and payment for game downloads remains a problem. Similarly, there could be a significant percentage of teens who have mobile subscriptions in their guardian's name.

As it turns out, when comparing the share of subscribers to the share of downloads in each age group, teens are actually more likely to download games as opposed to other content, according to the study.

Mixed results then, but the key factor here is that either way adults are buying and playing more mobile games than teens. Perhaps that explains all these adult titles on mobile.