More people are playing mobile games than ever before

...but the percentage of people downloading games has not increased over the past year, says M:Metrics.

Three quarters of the 98.4 million people in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US that played a mobile game in December played a game that was found natively on the device.

Meanwhile, M:Metrics says 38.5 million (8.8 per cent of mobile subscribers) played a game they had downloaded and stored on their phone, but that number has been  relatively flat from the year before, when 35.3 million (8.7 per cent) played a downloaded game.

Only 14.4 million (3.3 per cent) of mobile subscribers in the US and Western Europe downloaded a game in the month, compared to 14.6 million (3.6 per cent) in December 2006.