According to a recent study by Nielsen Research, Play Before Work: Games Most Popular Mobile App Category in U.S., the average mobile gamer plays an average of 7.8 hours a month. Neuralitic’s SevenFlow solution dove even further to unlock key traits of these users, including devices, in a recent customer study.

This Neuralitic study found that 73% of all smartphone subscribers access games (apps or mobile sites) through their device. Interestingly, the characteristics of subscribers using apps or gaming sites are vastly different.

Almost all smartphone users accessing gaming sites use gaming apps as well. But surprisingly, only 10% of subscribers using apps to game also use mobile gaming sites (including Zynga).

Interestingly enough, Neuralitic also looked at PC cards and found that just over 25% of all PC cards analyzed in the study access gaming sites, which is 15% more than smartphones.

When analyzing gaming frequency on smartphones, mobile users accessed gaming apps an average of 16 times per month while users accessed gaming sites less than 5 times per month.

The most popular devices for accessing gaming apps and gaming sites were the same, led by Apple and Google, while Nokia and Blackberry devices were consistently the least popular devices to game on. In fact, less than 1% of Nokia and BlackBerry users access gaming sites through their device, a crucial finding to mobile operators in terms of target marketing.

Subscribers accessing gaming sites have a total volume by user 2,906% higher than the average smartphone user. The correlation here is that those subscribers accessing gaming sites are also extremely active in P2P (peer-to-peer), music and movie downloads, and file management, among other high data activities.

There are a few marketing insights for mobile operators that surface from the Neuralitic study and Nielsen report, both based on Mobile Data Inelligence :

  • Mobile operators would be wise to make a deal with certain app and gaming providers and send messages to their subscriber base with potential gaming offers.
  • A specific gaming service bundle can be introduced for high gamers.
  • If users are gaming using smartphones only, mobile operators would be wise to propose a PC card for such users in order to present additional access options and revenue potential.
  • Subscribers that download music and stream video on their mobile devices at a high frequency (higher than 10% of the total volume) and who don’t access gaming sites, would be an ideal profile to market to.

There is certainly a lot of marketing potential – and mobile data – for operators to take a long, hard look at when it comes to gaming. As mentioned in the Nielsen research, users with Android smartphones tend to play around 9.3 hours each month, but users with iPhones play around 14.7 hours per month, which presents some interesting upsell opportunities for mobile operators to consider.

What do you think – how else can operators capitalize on this info? Do you feel the hours per month iphone and Android subscribers spend on gaming will increase, or has it reached saturation? Share your thoughts below.