BuzzCity mobile gaming charts highlight trends for mobile marketing strategies

The company's latest monthly Djuzz charts, show a 17% increase in games downloaded globally in November, bringing the total for the month to 7.6 million games.

Dr. KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity said: "A significant proportion of the growth in mobile gaming and other mobile internet usage that we are seeing are in areas where mobile is a cheaper and more accessible form of internet connectivity. This is particularly true in Africa, where Nigeria and Kenya have both seen triple digit growth in traffic to Djuzz over the last quarter."

India continues to dominate the Djuzz charts for the most games downloaded with 4mil downloads, helped in part by the strong localisation of games in this market. Reebok ZigTech, a game which the brand developed to promote its ZigTech brand of trainers and currently one of the most downloaded games in the country, is currently available exclusively to Indian audiences. The game was localised to suit the Indian market by having features such as a TV commercial showing the Captain of the Indian Cricket Team (Mahendra Singh Dhoni) and wallpapers with Reebok brand ambassadors from India.

Another reason for the quantity of game downloads in India is its bustling mobile game developer market. Among the Top 10 games, three were developed by Indian based (or owned) development companies; RockeTalk, IgFun (owned by Indiagames) and Mobimasta. The latter is a mobile marketing agency. Noteworthy too are Indiagames and Nazara, both of whom have multiple titles popular with Indian audiences.

"Localisation is one of the key elements required to better engage mobile users and it's likely that this trend will further develop in 2011", explains Dr. Lai. "Furthermore, as mobile marketing continues to mature, it's vital that brands don't restrict their strategies to smartphones. Feature phones continue to dominate in many areas and incorporating these handsets within mobile marketing strategies is vital."

This is supported by another trend which is emerging on Djuzz ' the development of more local language content besides English, such as Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, to serve the increasing demand from global visitors.

The Top 5 phones most favoured by Indian gamers are Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Micromax.