Techcrunch featured an article on a report by Distimo (a mobile phone analytics company) which showed how different categories of games performs in Apple’s App Store.  The bottom line is that Action, Adventure, and Arcade games seem to sell the most.  Since I wouldn’t classify Q Racer as Action, Adventure, or Arcade…This got me thinking…how do Eduational games fare in the App Store?

In terms of percentage of games in the App Store educational games doesn’t fare too poorly.  Educational games make up 7% of the total games in the App Store which puts it in the 6th out of 19 game sub categories.  The most by far is Puzzle games at 15% and the least is Racing and Dice games at 1%.

Q Racer we would classify as educational , but you could also call maybe classify it as racing and maybe trivia as well.  So in terms of competitors this suggests that there won’t be as many similar game offerings (hopefully being unique in a good way pays off for us) as ours.

Next thing worth looking at in the Distimo report (by the way which you can download here) is the average price of games organized by category.  Here Educational games command a whopping average price of $1.57 per game.  Educational games rank 13 of out the 19 games in terms of price.  This pales in comparison to top dog, Role Playing games, which gets a much healthier $7.95 per game.  The worst, or cheapest category of games are Kid’s games with a measly $1.29 per game. I guess parents aren’t as willing to spend top dollar on games for their kids.

It’s interesting looking at this pricing information.  Pricing games sometimes is more art than science, but with this data we might be able to get a good estimated price.  I figure since Q Racer is a mix of Educational, Racing, and Trivia, I can just take the average of those categories’ prices and bam! That will give us the price we should charge for our game.  According to this “strategy” the market price for our game should be…$1.91!  Or since Apple is against prices that don’t end in 99 cents we’ll just make it an even $1.99.  Man, this pricing thing is easy…

…however just because you can charge a lot for a game doesn’t necessarily mean you make a lot of money from it.  It all comes down to volume.  This is where Distimo gives us one last gem of information, the Most Grossing Game Categories based on percentage of game titles in the top overall games rankings.

Here Educational games doesn’t do so well at having a 2% share of games in the Top Overall Games ranking.  Action, Adventure, and Arcade definitely have a commanding lead over every other category.  Does that mean we should just give up on Q Racer and make a super fun filled action adventure / arcade game?  No, that just means there’s lot of room for improvement!  Plus if everyone knows how popular those other category games it just means more competition…which means making it harder for your game to get noticed.  And like prevailing iPhone success wisdom dictates…getting noticed translates into results.

Anyway, the report is definitely worth taking a look at if you are interested in this stuff.  Can any of you guys (either developers or game buyers) confirm that the results of this report are accurate from what you’ve seen?