The magic of mobile games is that they can be played anywhere, but it turns out that quite a lot of us are more than happy to play them when not on the move, according to a new survey from mobile entertainment portal MocoSpace.
Taking in responses from some 15,000 U.S. consumers, the company found that 96 percent of them said that they play mobile games at home at least once a day, and among those, 53 percent said they played them in bed — with more than 52 percent playing for over one hour per day and 32 percent playing for more than three hours per day.
The findings reinforce data out released earlier this week on mobile gaming from mobile content company Miniclip, which found that 44 percent of people surveyed for the report said that they mostly played mobile games at home. And MocoSpace notes, too, that EA Mobile has also found that mobile games are played at home 47 percent of the time.
But before you go thinking that this is a sign that mobile gaming isn’t so mobile after all, it turns out that MocoSpace’s survey revealed a number of other locations that received similarly high (but not as high) responses: 83 percent said they played mobile games while waiting for an appointment and 72 percent while commuting.
A lot also seem to play them when they should be doing something else: work and “out with friends” both picked up 64 percent of mobile game play; and 46 percent said they played while in class. Some 10 percent of respondents said they played at work for over an hour every day.
While bed was the most popular location for playing a mobile game at home, 41 percent said living room. (Bathrooms, it turns out, are not very popular for mobile games: only five percent said they played there; ditto the dining table at one percent.)
And in keeping with the runaway success of Draw Something, social games scored as the most popular in mobile, with 62 percent opting for these over action, puzzle or gambling games.
What to make of these results? A lot of the most popular mobile games up to now have been casual games and those that can be played in short bursts — like Draw Something but also Angry Birds and the rest.
But if most of the gaming is taking place over at least an hour of time, and in stationary (sometimes very stationary) locations, there is probably scope for the development of more time-based and involved games, the kind that have been traditionally associated with gaming consoles — and fill that niche in the market.