MobileRated downloads top 750,000 a month
Free mobile games clearly going down a storm
MobileRated has announced that it's generating 750,000 downloads a month of its free mobile games, which the company says proves the demand from gamers for free mobile entertainment.
The company has a catalogue of over 350 titles from more than 80 developers. Where does the money come from? Most of the titles have in-game adverts, while others are Try & Buy demos.
Three quarters of a million downloads can't be sniffed at, but we do have reservations. When something's free, the key thing isn't how many people say 'yes please', but how often they actually use it afterwards. In theory, people could be downloading loads of freebies from MobileRated, and only playing them once or twice.
Of course, this wouldn't be sustainable for the advertising model used by the site – advertisers won't pay up unless their ads are being seen, which means plenty of repeat plays.
MobileRated isn't announcing that kind of data publicly for the moment though, so it's hard to judge just how successful the idea of free mobile games is. President and CEO Richard Mosher says the best games are bubbling to the top though.
"At the end of the day, all games are judged based upon their merits," he says. "Some of my favourite games are the totally free games."
