busted loop

Earlier this week there was excitement about Mobclix numbers indicating that the iPhone game count has exceeded 13,000. We provided an alternate measurement that puts the total a little lower, but regardless of how you count them up, games are the largest category of iPhone apps. Every day 40-200 new games are added to the App Store (and between 10 and 50 are removed). If growth continues at this pace you'll be able to choose from over 25,000 games by the end of the year.

The flood of new titles has created fierce competition among publishers, and as a result we've seen lots of version updates to existing games. Almost a quarter (24%) of games were updated or added in the last month. Over half of game releases in the App Store are less than 90 days old.

The ratio is even higher for the most popular titles: 36% of games across Top 25 lists have a release/update date less than 30 days ago. Comparing the Top 25 to the least popular games in each category we see that the proportion of "old" games is similar but the segment of very new titles is much smaller:

The least popular segment, which is made up of the lowest ranking 100 games each category, has a marginally lower ratio of 90-days-or-older titles, and about half the ratio of 30-days-or-newer games. The difference is made up of games that are between 60 and 90 days old. There's some good analysis to be done on that segment, we'll get to that in a later article that's not focused on games.

The numbers and charts above are based on the entire App Store game universe - All apps that appear in any game sub-category. Because the sub-categories have very different characteristics (like they're not all the same size) they each behave differently. It's not really fair to measure them all together. Doing so can combine competing metrics, causing them to cancel out and not be represented in the results. For example, you may have heard about the explosion in role playing games for the iPhone. This chart shows the huge segment of very new releases.

Unfortunately I don't have the slightest interest in Role Playing games. But I do love racing games, and there's not enough good ones for the iPhone (I'm hoping someone finds a way to use the compass for driving...) Take a look at the same chart for the Top 25 Racing games. It confirms what I already know: not nearly as many new racing titles.

But averaging isn't always bad, and we do it all the time anyway. To prove it I'll give you this table sorted by the average age of all games in each genre. I also included the oldest and newest release in the Top 25 lists.

Some of the apps in the Top 25 lists are over a year old!