Mobile games have reserved a great share of the video game markets for themselves and the majority of the revenue generated by the industry, comes from the breakout user generating nature of these games. It’s safe to say that the growth, development and user generation of the mobile games in Iran, happened with considerable speed compared to other parts of the world, the reason being the relatively small society of console and PC gamers in Iran. The expensiveness and the lack of easy access to consoles or PC hardware are great contributors for people to welcome mobile games.

The following report is the result of an analysis done on the data from the survery done by the Digital Games Research Center in year 1396 (December 2017- March 2018). The statistical focus for this project was of 8000 people and mixed method sampling (Cluster sampling – Multilevel sampling) was used for this project. The first level clusters accommodated all the provinces of the country and on the next levels, cities and towns are covered. This report is dedicated to a specific part of the report called: “who plays mobile games?”

Iran has 24 million and 700 thousand mobile gamers

The number of Iranian mobile gamers who play more than an hour a week with their smartphone or tablet, is 24 million and 700 thousand, out of which 64 percent are male and 36 percent are female. The average playtime for those who prefer mobile games is 73 minutes a day, which differs between males and females. Males on average play 78 minutes and that number for females is 63 minutes a day.  76 percent of these users live in cities and 24 percent live in the rural areas of the country.

Most of the gamers are teenagers

The age range of the mobile gamers is such as this: 32 percent are children under the age of twelve, 35 percent are teenagers between 12 and 19 years of age, 26 percent are youngsters between ages of 20 and 34, 6 percent are middle-aged people between 35 to 59 and only 1 percent are senior citizens with 60 years of age and above. The average age of all is 18 with 41 percent older than 18 and 59 percent younger than 18. Again, this is not the same for men and women. The average age of male players is 18 years, but for female players it is 19.

Most of Iranian gamers are single

As for the marital status of the mobile gamers, it correlates directly with their age range. 77 percent of these people are single, 6 percent are married with no child, 16 percent are married with one child and one percent is comprised of other people like those who have divorced, their spouse is deceased or experience a different types of marital status.

Most of the Iranian mobile gamers are comprised of students of high school and pre-high school

As to the education off the mobile gamers, we see that 67 percent of them are students of high school and pre-high school. Which is obviously due to the average age of 18 years old. Another 15 percent of the gamers’ society have diplomas or are taking pre-university course. 10 percent have bachelor degrees, 6 percent have associate degrees and the other 2 percent have postgraduate education.

Most Iranian gamers in Iran pay no attention to the age classification of games

Unfortunately, the age classification of games still holds not much value for the Iranian gamers. 28 percent pay them attention to some extent and only 25 percent are dedicated to meet the age restrictions of video games. When we divide these statistics gender-wise, we see that females pay better attention to age restrictions – about 31 percent of females. 27 percent of them pay are nearly dedicated to the age restrictions and 42 percent don’t value them. As for the males, 50 percent don’t value the ratings at all, 28 percent are relatively dedicated to them and only 22 percent value the restrictions fully.

As it’s shown in the statistics, most of the Iranian gamers are children and teenagers. So culturalization and informing of parents about the observation of the correct way to use video games and keeping up with their age restrictions is crucial to have beside the industrial and financial growth of video games.