Mobile operators are increasingly looking to data services to boost revenues as income from voice plans continue to fall.

Although mobile gaming remains a nice market, research firm In-Stat/MDR believes it will eventually become a key contributor to wireless data usage and revenues. In-Stat/MDR predicts that by 2009 mobile gaming services in the United States will generate $1.8 billion annually, or approximately 4.4 percent of total wireless data revenues. That's for a market of 78.6 million wireless subscribers that play mobile games.

At that same time, there should be ten times the number of mobile gaming downloads as we saw last year. As In-Stat/MDR Director of Wireless Research Clint Wheelock commented "Mobile gaming has come a long way since 'Snake' was first deployed on wireless handsets in 1997."

A similar report by Juipter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (the parent company of this website) from May 2004—while also offering impressive numbers—delivered a more modest outlook for the portable gaming market.

According to Jupiter, the addressable audience of portable gamers will nearly double from 23 million to 43 million by 2009. That includes users of dedicated game devices such as Nintendo's GameBoy, hybrid game devices such as Nokia's N-Gage and Tapwave's Zodiac, and gamers that play more than five hours per week on their PDAs or mobile handsets.

The difference between In-Stat/MDR and Jupiter outlooks is a matter of how one defines a portable gamer. So while In-Stat/MDR predicts 78.6 million wireless subscribers will play mobile games by 2009, its data pool extends way beyond Jupiter's, which limits wireless gamers to those who play more than five hours per week. There is no minimum gameplay time limit for In-Stat/MDR.

Consequently, the seeming chasm between the two analyst companies' numbers is not so large after all. Either way, wireless carriers, developers and device manufacturers can bank on years of keeping millions of thumbs busy.