Apple and Google Capture U.S. Video Game Market Share in 2010
Last year, Flurry reported that iPhone and iPod touch game sales surged from 2008 to 2009. From a standing start, and in just one year, iPhone games captured 5% of the mature U.S. video game market.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Flurry putting a number on a shift its own earlier data foreshadowed: by August 2009 it reported that gaming dominated iPhone sales while apps were most popular on Android, and Gartner's figure for iPhones growing 245% in 2008 had already built the installed base such a market would need.
The new claim — that iPhone games took 5% of the mature U.S. video game market in 2010, essentially from a standing start — converts those device-level signals into a share-of-market statement, and it names both platform owners: Apple via iOS, Google via Android.
First-order effects
- Apple now has measured evidence that its App Store is competing directly with established U.S. game retail rather than sitting outside it, strengthening its pitch to game developers choosing where to ship first.
- Google gains the same argument for Android, whose app mix per Flurry's 2009 finding skewed toward non-game apps — meaning games are the category with the clearest headroom on that platform.
Second-order effects
- Game developers allocating finite studio capacity face a new trade-off between shelf slots on consoles and handhelds versus self-published distribution through Apple's and Google's stores, where the platform sets the terms and takes its cut.
- If the 5% share came disproportionately at the low end of the price ladder, incumbents selling packaged and mid-priced titles face pressure to justify price gaps against $0.99–$4.99 app-store alternatives.
Third-order effects
- Market-share accounting itself changes: once analyst firms like Flurry fold smartphone platforms into 'the U.S. video game market,' every subsequent quarterly comparison forces console makers to compete inside a denominator they did not previously report against.
- A sustained pattern would make platform-holder economics — store rules, revenue splits, featured placement — a structural lever over the games business, the way they already are over general-purpose apps.
The trend: Smartphone platforms are moving from peripheral novelty to a measured segment of the U.S. video game market, with app-store economics setting the terms of competition for developers and incumbents alike.