Tablets Are For Gaming

We'll be seeing more tablet games, if this survey is correct.

A new survey from Google's AdMob division shows that gaming is the most popular activity on tablets. Which should not be a huge surprise given the number of games appearing in App stores. Games beat out email and surfing the web, as 84% said it was their number one activity. Given that tablets are undergoing explosive growth (Apple is expected to sell about 48 million iPads this year, and then there's everybody else's tablet...) this is rapidly becoming an important market for game developers. It's not just revising your iPhone game to fit a different resolution; the larger screen size offers many more possibilities.

A full 38% said they spend more than two hours a day with their tablets, while 43% say they use it more than they used their computers. 82% said they primarily used it at home, which is interesting given the way businesses have been snapping up tablets.

I think the tablet market looks like an exciting place for game developers in the next few years. The expansion looks to be huge; the latest figures from Gartner Group show they expect the total tablet market to hit 294 million by 2015. That's up from about 15 million at the end of 2010; Apple's share will fall from 83% of the market to 47%, but that's still a hell of a lot of tablets. Consider this compared to the installed base of consoles; about 85 million Wii's, 50 million Xbox 360's, and 48 million PS3's... even if you added them all together it's about half the number of tablets expected in a few years. The capability of the new iPad 2 is getting quite robust, being perhaps better than a Wii in raw horsepower and graphics performance, and approaching the other consoles. Tablets are on a yearly upgrade cycle, not the 5-7 year (or more!) cycle that consoles usually follow (and this generation of consoles wants to stretch things out for years more if they can), so in a couple of years I'd expect tablets to be outstripping console capability. It's also important to note that right now, with a $99 Apple TV, you can shoot your iPad output straight to your TV... hey, that sounds a lot like a console, doesn't it?