Smartphone gaming catching up with DS-PSP - Report

It doesn't take a research firm to know that more people are playing games on their mobile devices than ever before, but it might take a research firm to say how many more people are getting their gaming fix on phones. Research firm Interpret LLC today released a report suggesting that the number of smartphone gamers is growing faster than the audience for traditional handheld systems like the PSP and DS.

Interpret determined a user base of roughly 12 million active players gamed exclusively on smartphones in the second quarter of 2010, up from 7.4 million for the same period the year before. While the PSP and DS commanded a larger dedicated player base of 21.5 million, it had grown only slightly from the previous year's 21 million total. The number of players who gamed on both smartphones and handhelds also jumped, going from 3.5 million in 2009 to 4.7 million earlier this year. The findings were based on a demographically representative survey of 9,000 consumers between the ages of 12 and 65.

According to the report, "While numbers of PSP/DS gamers have remained relatively stable, the explosive proportional growth of the phone gaming market could signal a potentially significant threat to or even coup of the reigning handheld sovereigns: Sony and Nintendo."

Interpret concluded that traditional gaming companies are losing out to phone makers in the bid to attract new audiences, that DS and PSP gamers are increasingly abandoning their systems in favor of mobile phone gaming, or both. Backing up the notion of defecting gamers, Interpret said that more than 27 percent of consumers who gamed exclusively on their phones actually own a DS or a PSP but hadn't used those systems in the previous three months.