OPINION: Who knows how the mobile games market will grow?

Some people enjoy sitting around on a weekday night chugging down some brewskis and watching the box. Not the diligent Pocket Gamer crew. Instead, we mull over salient mobile games business matters (well, it's all repeats these days, isn't it?)

And last night, we got to thinking: How big is the mobile games market and, more importantly, how big will it get?

Despite having attended dozens of mobile games industry conference, we had no clear idea about the answers. But we knew a search engine that might. Some tapping, clicking and playing with graph paper later, however, and we discovered we weren't alone. No one really knows: There's no concensus as to how big mobile gaming is now, and even less as to how big it could be.

To try to clarify matters, we decided to collect together all the official predictions made by mobile analysts over the past couple of years and then split them into a set of highest and lowest numbers. Presumably, we'd expect the truth to lie somewhere in the middle. After all, these are very clever people, and their reports cost thousands of pounds to buy.

Alas, we only ended up with the very strange and pointy graph below.

The reason it's particularly strange is that no single analyst or report would ever predicted the mobile phone market will have a 'boom, bust and boom' again between 2009 and 2011. Mobile is not that sort of cyclical business.

Yet that's what they predict, when taken together over a couple of years.

The finding results from our Wisdom of the Crowds approach of collating multiple analyst's 'guesses'; their aggressively positively predictions in the past (notably in 2005) seem to have ensured that, when analysts were making their predictions in 2006, they'd realised they had gone over the top, thus making even their most positive subsequent predictions for 2010 much lower, and thus causing the big trough.

(For the record, our figures were taken from predictions made between 2004-2006 by a variety of companies such as Ovum, Jupiter, Informa and Screen Digest.)

The trend is also reflected in the collection of the most negative predictions (the blue line), although in this case it's just a 'boom, bust and relax' rather than a full 'boom, bust and boom again'. When analysts are pessimistic, they are less extreme than when they are being optimistic, it seems.

Pocket Gamer's predictions

All very interesting, but it hasn't really helped us solve our initial question as to the future size of the mobile games market. So, in the interests of the entire industry, we got out our calculators and tried to make some predictions of our own.

If we take the lowest figure for the size of the global mobile games in 2006 – about $2 billion (that seems about right, given the US market was less than $500 million that year) – we can use this as an anchor point and project two simple high and low Pocket Gamer prediction curves (the green lines).

Obviously, to get our curves we need to make some assumptions about how rapidly the uptake of mobile games will be over the years ahead.

Analysts might try to thoughtfully derive these figures from, say, the expansion of mobile phones into markets like China and India, the ever-greater prevalence of high-end handsets in the market (which make gaming more attractive) or even the ongoing march of new billing methods like All You Can Eat subscription tariffs (where you pay a flat fee and download whatever games and other stuff you like).

Having watched predictions flounder in everything from online gaming to digital distribution for well over a decade, however, us cynical hacks have chosen instead to simply plug a couple of growth rate percentage figures into our calculators to see where we get.

Our lower green prediction is a near-straight line. This assumes that the growth of the mobile games market drops steadily from around 25 per cent in 2007 to about 15 per cent in 2010. That seems a likely scenario, in so much as the larger any market gets, the harder it is to keep up the turbo-charged growth; in other words, ever more of those who might want to play mobile games will be playing them, so growth tails off.

The higher curve is a bit more optimistic, in that it predicts that while growth still falls, it does so at a slower rate and it's never less than 30 per cent per year – a big number when you're talking about market that worth billions of dollars. Let hope the Indians and Chinese really do like Java games.

The result of all this hocus pocus mathematics? Pocket Gamer predicts the size of the mobile games market will be between $6 to $9 billion by 2011, up from $2 billion in 2006. And you get that for free. Which is about what such guesswork is worth, whoever is peddling it, and however entertaining it is to speculate on such matters.