Of course we don't know exactly what questions were asked, or how the participants were chosen, so it's difficult to know the significance of any of these figures, but other potentially interesting results of the survey include:
- 34% of phone gamers play phone games every day
- When allowed to try them side by side, 63% preferred Nokia's Next Gen games when compared to 2D and 3D Java games
- 45% prefer Over The Air game distribution (downloads straight onto the phone), 34% prefer Over The Internet distribution (downloads via a PC)
- 45% play multiplayer phone games at least once a month (if you just look at India, 56% played multiplayer phone games at least once a week and one in four played them every day)
- 43% would download two or three game demos per week, compared to 21% who would only download one demo per week.
More numbers can be found in the press release.
If these figures are representative (and we have to keep in mind that we don't know that yet) then it bodes well for Nokia: there's a potentially vast audience for their Next Gen games platform, bigger than the audience for handheld consoles, and this audience seems to like what Next Gen has to offer (better games than Java, OTA and OTI distribution, multiplayer games, demos available of every game).
Gerard Wiener, the former head of the N-Gage unit at Nokia, said their aim with the Next Gen platform wasn't to compete with consoles but to get a slice of a much larger cake, the phone game market. He might just turn out to be right.