Eric Johnson

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Survey Says Mobile Gamers Prefer Kindle Fire Over Tablets With Google Play

survey-saysThe most popular mobile/handheld devices for playing videogames in the U.S. are Android phones and Apple’s iPad tablets, but Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets made a surprisingly strong showing in a June survey conducted by IDC.

Those survey results appear in the latest IDC-App Annie mobile gaming spotlight, out today. The overall winner was Apple, with more than 35 percent of 1,117 respondents naming iPhones, iPod touches or (mostly) iPads as their favorite portable gaming devices. Android smartphones kept Google’s app store in second place, but on its own, the Kindle Fire — which is based on Android but uses Amazon’s own app store rather than Google Play — tallied about 12 percent of the votes.

The survey additionally found that the audiences for Android smartphone and iPad games were “remarkably similar.” The average Android phone gamer is 41 years old, and 53 percent are female; the average iPad gamer, according to the same survey, is 42 years old, and 54 percent are female.

Apple also won in terms of revenue in Q3 2013, monetizing three times as well as Google Play games in the U.S., according to App Annie. The report did not say how the two stacked up to monetization on Amazon’s app store.

As was the case in Q2 of this year, the iOS App Store and Google Play were the top two drivers of consumer spending in mobile games, with Nintendo and Sony’s handheld consoles in third. However, thanks to some new “hit games” for the Nintendo 3DS (Pokemon X and Y, methinks), revenue in that third category rose nearly 50 percent, just barely scraping the bottom of Google Play’s totals.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google