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?

Gaming addons for tablets

Here's an interesting idea: a joystick you can add on to your iPad for better game controls. It's $25, so you have to be willing to spend more than the cost of several games to buy one... but it is interesting, if it works as well as they describe. I don't think it will catch on in a big way, but it does show that gaming on tablets is enough of a market to encourage add-ons.

If only you could download it...

Will Tablets Be Bigger Than Consoles?

If you believe the Gartner Group's analysts, the overall tablet market is going to grow at an amazing rate -- and it will become bigger than any game console by 2012. Yes, the prices for games are less... but note that iPad games tend to have a higher price than iPhone games (all of $4 or $5 instead of $2 or $3). Still, when you're looking at a total market of 175 million or so by the end of 2012, it should be enough to convince you to enter that market.

The chart from Forester Research, above, shows tablets gaining a quarter of the US market in a few years for all computing devices... that's out of 500 million or so sold. Makes you wonder why other companies are taking so long to challenge the iPad.... but it may be tougher than it looks. Android is not yet tablet-ready, according to Google. And Apple has a number of custom chips, and patents, that may be hard to work around. Still, the lure of the market size will get competitors to figure out ways around these barriers.

Here's what Gartner predicts for tablet sales (iPad and Android and whatever else, though iPad will probably get the biggest share):

	2010 Sales	2011 Sales	2012 Sales	2013 Sales
Media Tablets	19,490	54,781	103,425	154,150

(numbers are in thousands)

Add those up and you can see that by 2012 tablets will be a larger market than any console; the iPad by itself will probably be among the biggest consoles ever. (Expect Apple to sell about 24 million next year, on top of the 16 million or so this year... it'll be comparable to the Xbox 360 base, bigger than the PS3. Note that the iPad is only one of the iOS devices... which currently total about 125 million worldwide installed base.)

"The all-in-one nature of media tablets will result in the cannibalization of other consumer electronics devices such as e-readers, gaming devices, and media players," said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

Yes, they're talking about tablets demolishing the netbook category (strangled in its crib, essentially), and taking a chunk out of notebooks and accelerating the move away from desktop computers. Manufacturers are already seeing this in their sales numbers.

Some perspective is provided by looking at total worldwide console sales:

Console	(Millions)
Playstation	103
PS2	145
PS3	38
NES	62
SNES	49
N64	33
Gamecube	22
Wii	71
Xbox	24
Xbox 360	42
Game Boy	119
GBA	82
DS	125
PSP	53

So the biggest installed base, worldwide, is the PS2 at 145 million. Not bad, but nothing today is selling in numbers to come close to the PS2. Game consoles are lucky to crack 500,000 sales in a month, and usually it's lower (the Wii is hitting 250,000 per month now). The iPad is looking at getting to 2 million a month by the end of 2011 (it's already over 1.3 million per month), and to keep climbing. Note also that with the new Apple TV you'll be able to wirelessly stream any game you're playing on your iPad right to your TV... or iPhone game, or iPod Touch game. Soon you'll be seeing Apple TV with its own App Store and its own games. Oh, console makers have a lot to worry about.

Still, there are some interesting flaws in the picture. One is that a recent survey showed one third of all iPad owners so far have never downloaded an app; not a single one. Seems odd to me, but that will probably continue to some extent. The iPad is getting some very casual users who aren't computer savvy and may just be content to browse the web, or play their media library. But with a little advertising I bet that percentage will shrink.

Update: Seems like Nielsen was wrong about that statistic; only 9% of iPad owners haven't downloaded an app. They recanted here; no explanation, no apology. Makes you kind of suspect their other numbers...