Angry Birds Has Over 1.5 Million Game Center Users, But Is That A Lot?
October 18, 2010
It appears that iOS game developers have fallen in love with Apple's Game Center over the last month, with old and new games gaining support for it daily. But the question is, are gamers themselves putting the new service to use, or is it all for not?
Stuart Dredge from Mobile Entertainment crunched some basic numbers, and what he found out was that gamers are definitely utilizing the service, it's just at what capacity?
Dredge took a handful of popular games, tallied up their current number of players based on Game Center leaderboards, and compared them with recently released sales figures. What he discovered is that the numbers are really all over the place, but it's obvious that newer games are seeing a much higher return than older ones.
For example, Angry Birds, the App Store's obvious sales leader, has sold around 6.5 million copies. Of those 6.5 million users, only about 1.56 million have utilized Apple's Game Center, which comes to a paltry 24 percent. In comparison, the recently released yet hugely successful physics-based title, Cut the Rope, now has over 1 million users, and of those 1 million users, about 630,000 have utilized Game Center, which is about 63 percent of the install base.
Dredge attributes these rather large usage differences to a number of things, including the age of a title, the desire to go back and beat a game to simply earn achievements or move up leaderboards, competition from other services like OpenFeint and Plus+, and, of course, the fact that Game Center isn't compatible with all iDevices.
So the question is, have you utilized Apple's Game Center yet? And, if so, what originally compelled you to sign up for the service? Was it the achievements, leaderboards, multiplayer capabilities, etc.? Have you gone back to some older games just to earn achievements, or have you primarily used the service in new games?