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"The week between Christmas and New Years has become the great 'Game Rush' for iPhone games - essentially what Black Friday is to brick and mortar retailers," said Raymond Lau, co-founder and CEO of PlayHaven. "This soaring increase in iPhone game downloads is even more spectacular when you consider the slow holiday sales this year for console game titles."
iTouch Comes Into Its Own
Of this activity, the device leading the charge is the iTouch - not the ubiquitous iPhone, according to separate research from Flurry.
Flurry evaluated download growth driven by Christmas across the leading Apple and Android devices, as well as their respective app stores, pulling a sample that represents approximately 10% of all download volume in the App Store and Android Market. It found that out of the estimated 58 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices in the market at the time, roughly 40% of those, or 24 million, were iPod Touch devices.
Apparently an influx of new iPod Touch devices has flooded the market over Christmas, and that users of the handset, primarily pre-teen and teen audiences, are voracious downloaders, Flurry said in a blog post.
App downloads on iPod Touch soared past iPhone for the first time, eclipsing iPhone downloads by 172%. Furthermore, iPod Touch 3G downloads increased by more than 900% on Christmas Day, compared to the average of all previous Fridays in December.
Flurry was surprised at its own findings. A month ago, November had set previous download volume records, growing by 15% over October. Toward the end of November, it forecasted that December download volumes in the App Store would exceed November by more than 20%. As it turned out, Flurry underestimated growth by more than half - App Store download growth increased by more than 50% in December over November.
Outside the Ecosystem
The App Store's dominance in the iPhone/iTouch ecosystem, however, may not last indefinitely. PlayHaven also found that in the coming year, games and applications will increasingly originate for other sources. By the end of 2010, up to 25% of games and apps may originate at an outside location
Source: http://www.marketingvox.com/iphoneitouch-downloads-explode-this-week-045866/
