iGame Radio

Flurry, the mobile analytics company, released their industry Pulse report today about the genealogy of developers of the App Store. Flurry tracks over 20,000 live applications and over 2 billion user sessions each month, so has an immense amount of data to rely on.

Flurry created six “heritage” categories by generating a list of 200 applications across the top 100 free and paid apps lists. Each category consisted of companies that had been founded for a particular purpose, and had made their way into the App Store.

The categories included:

• Native iPhone: Companies founded to create applications for iPhone (e.g., Freeverse, PageOnce)
• Traditional Media: Companies established on Film, TV, Print and Radio (e.g., Disney, TBS, NYT)
• Mobile: Companies having started on J2ME, BREW, BlackBerry, etc. (e.g., Digital Chocolate, eBuddy)
• Retail & CPG: Brick-and-mortar companies or ones that manufacture goods (e.g., The Gap, DKNY, Kraft)
• Online: Companies who began on the web including e-Commerce, social networks, online gaming, streaming music, etc. (e.g., Google, eBay, Facebook, Pandora, PopCap, Zynga)
• Traditional Gaming: Video game companies from console, portable or PC (e.g., EA, Activision).

Wait…what? Freeverse was a company founded to create applications for the iPhone? That’s news to me.

Freeverse was founded in 1994 as a shareware company bringing games to the Mac. And though they have focused mostly on the iPhone, even just recently merging with ngmoco, they still have stated that they will be bringing some games to the Mac, and are still supporting past games and applications.

Also, notice that PopCap is listed in the Online category. Now, I will agree that in 2000 when PopCap first started, it introduced Bejeweled as a web-based Flash game. But that was ten years ago. One can hardly list PopCap now, or even when they first starting porting their games over to the iPhone, as an online gaming company, certainly not in the vein of Zynga or Facebook.

What if we moved Freeverse and PopCap into the only category that really describes them…Traditional Gaming? How would that change the percentages?

According to the report, the current percentages for the App Store in the games category are:

Flurry Developer Heritage, Games Category

It’s hard to tell exactly, not knowing what the exact numbers are, but I would hazard to say that the 21% for the Native iPhone category would probably drop down a bit, and I think the Online category would take a pretty big hit…PopCap’s numbers with Bejeweled 2, Plants vs Zombies, etc, are no small potatoes.

So, what is the purpose of these categories in the first place? The Flurry Pulse report states: “To generate a sample that allowed us to compare across categories and pricing models (paid, ad supported, micro-transactions, etc.)” If that is the case, then Flurry does the industry a disservice by taking some big hitters and placing them in other, smaller categories.

The reasons behind these placements are not clear-cut. Freeverse may have only come onto Flurry’s radar when they jumped into the iPhone development scene with both feet. But this itself points to a lack of research on Flurry’s part. PopCap did begin its life as a web-based game company, but many years ago (2003?) moved to PC gaming as its main development platform, with web-games as a support mechanism. And showing where the first few years of a company’s life came from doesn’t really help the industry.

This report seemed to be about where these companies where shortly before they entered the iPhone scene. There is no doubt that PopCap was a PC/Mac game development company that ported their games to console and used the web as gaming support, and Freeverse was a Mac game development company. Both belong in the Traditional Gaming category.

By placing Freeverse and PopCap in the categories that they did, Flurry has done a disservice to the industry by misrepresenting where it is, and thus where it might go in the future.