With an overwhelming advantage in sales numbers, Apple's iOS platform appears to be the world's most popular platform for playing games. And judging by the growth of the number of Game Center users, Apple might even be able to boast that iOS will be the most popular gaming platform for the foreseeable future.
Market analyst site Asymco recently compared cumulative sales of home console and handheld gaming devices to the number of registered users for the iOS Game Center service as a way to measure iOS as a gaming platform. Apple noted during its keynote address at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference that Game Center—a free service that facilitates high score tracking, achievements, and online play—has 130 million users. Asymco suggests that number can serve as a proxy for the number of iOS gamers; as such, they put iOS well ahead of any current console, and trail just behind the Nintendo DS's roughly 150 million unit sales. Considering the Playstation 2's roughly 150 million unit sales, that would rank iOS as the third most popular gaming platform of all time.
The raw sales figures alone put the iOS platform itself far beyond any dedicated gaming platform. Apple has sold over 400 million total iOS devices, which beats the combined sales of all current-generation consoles as well as combined sales of portable gaming platforms. As our own Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland noted, "Even with a small percentage of iOS users actively gaming, as measured by Game Center, it's still bigger than most any major console."
Asymco says that at its current growth rate, Game Center users could likely exceed the 150 million mark by September. They could break the 200 million mark by year's end. No other dedicated gaming platform has reached sales of 200 million units.
However, before Apple launched Game Center in 2010, several other similar gaming networks had cropped up. One service that continued to have wide support on iOS after Game Center launched was OpenFeint. The company was acquired in 2011, though it last reported having 180 million iOS users in October 2011. Using that figure as a proxy for "active" gamers, that would already put iOS well beyond both the Playstation 2 and the still-current Nintendo DS platform.
Additionally, many games don't require Game Center registration at all to play, even for turn-based or multiplayer play. Some games, such as Real Racing 2, Ticket to Ride, and Words with Friends, use their own servers, while others use WiFi or Bluetooth for multiplayer action. And while Game Center provides a centralized identity for playing others and tracking achievements, some games rely on Facebook or other login methods.
iOS isn't the only general purpose platform for gaming, though. PCs still outsell iOS devices, but the latest research suggests that gamers account for a much smaller percentage of overall PC users compared to iOS users, totaling about 54 million users worldwide. (As a side note, Valve counts 40 million users of its Steam game distribution platform.) And the Entertainment Software Association's latest data suggests that newer generations of gamers tend to use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets over PCs and consoles.
Android also outsells iOS overall, though developers have suggested the market for games is nowhere near as successful as iOS. One popular game reportedly made nearly 20 times the sales on iOS as on Android.
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