据移动分析公司Flurry上周发布的一份调查报告显示，手机游戏玩家与掌机游戏玩家的特性非常不同。该报告调查了6万名手机社交游戏用户，他们主要玩过EA旗下的Pogo游戏、Zynga的《Words With Friends》、《FarmVille》等手机社交游戏。

该报告指出，手机社交游戏玩家的平均年龄是28岁，比掌机或PC游戏玩家平均年轻6岁；在全球手机社交游戏市场中，女性玩家占53%。这一调查结果多少有点出人意料，它颠覆了人们原先认为游戏玩家基本上是30多岁男子坐在电脑前一边畅饮红牛，一边玩战争游戏的刻板印象，随着智能手机市场规模的扩大，手机游戏也呈现了强劲的增长趋势，广告主、开发商和应用商店运营商都应该把握时机，分别牢记以下几点：

farmville-iphone

广告主：手机社交游戏比世界掌机游戏更有成为主流趋势的可能，它规模庞大、男女兼具的用户群是广告主的潜目标受众。据游戏邦了解，与其他类型的移动广告不同，社交游戏很适合投放那些要求用户参与品牌推广活动，或点击获取相关奖励的广告。这类广告远非那种浮动型、容易被用户忽略的条幅广告（而且这种做法只会助推其他手机游戏的流量增长），广告主应该与开发商共同合作，将自己的广告推广活动植入具有知名度的游戏，通过传统媒介、在线广告等途径在多款游戏中进行交叉推广。

开发商：开发商应该采纳多种可行的创收策略，比如前途光明的免费模式、付费下载模式和广告赞助的免费模式。手机社交游戏很适合采用内置付费模式，鼓励用户为虚拟道具或新关卡而付费（游戏邦注：当然，要尽量避免年幼无知的孩子让父母的话费帐单超支的情况）。

应用商店运营商：因为苹果App Store和谷歌Android Market中的应用产品正不断涌现，导致手机应用在这些平台获得的曝光率的机会越来越少。所以应用商店运营商们可以由此入手，为开发商打造一个优化、利润可观、有助于增加产品曝光率的应用销售平台。游戏邦认为，这类应用商店应该将最流行、高质量、来自著名发行商的游戏作为自家店面的招牌“推荐”产品，通过销售记录和用户评论等推荐服务，让用户更方便地找到相关游戏。除此之外，应用商店还需要充分借助社交功能，鼓励用户向好友推荐相关游戏，以此推动游戏下载量。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

How Mobile Is Changing the Video Game Market

Tweet Last week, mobile analytics firm Flurry released the results of a survey of more than 60,000 users who play mobile social games — a space that includes everything from Electronic Arts’ Pogo lineup to Zynga’s Words With Friends and FarmVille. As it turns out, on-the-go gamers are very different than their console-playing counterparts.

The average mobile social gamer is 28 years old, according to Flurry — about six years younger than the average player on consoles or PCs — and women account for 53 percent of the worldwide mobile social gaming market. That’s somewhat different from the stereotypical image of a 30-something dude chugging Red Bull to play a war game all night. And with the continued proliferation of smartphones laying the foundation for dramatic long-term growth, advertisers, developers and app store operators bear the following in mind:

For advertisers: Mobile social gaming is far more mainstream than the world of console gaming. So its audience is low-hanging fruit for a wide variety of potential advertisers, especially those looking to target both women and men. Unlike other types of mobile ads, social gaming is well suited to the kind of “actionable” advertising strategies that ask a consumer to engage with a brand

or click to call. But those ads should be more than just the pedestrian banner ads that increasingly ignored by consumers (and that often just push other mobile games). Instead, advertisers should work with developers to integrate their campaigns with well-known games, and cross-promote them via traditional media and online ads.

For developers: Developers should employ every available strategy in monetizing mobile social games, from the promising freemium model to simple paid downloads to free titles supported entirely by ad revenues. And mobile social gaming is a particularly good fit for in-app purchases that encourage users to cough up a few dollars to acquire virtual tools or access new levels. (As long as those games don’t encourage kids to ring up ridiculous charges on their parents’ phone bills.)

For app store operators: The likelihood of an app being found gets increasingly harder as the Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market add more titles. So app store operators can cash in on the exploding space by making sure the best — and most lucrative — games are easy to find. They should spotlight the most popular and highest-quality games as “featured” titles, especially those from established, trusted publishers, and make it easy for gamers to find relevant titles by using recommendations based on past purchases and reviews. And app stores should leverage the social component by encouraging users to suggest specific games to their friends who opt to receive those suggestions.（source:gigaom）