Free mobile game

Calling the business “underappreciated and unfairly criticized,” he took the audience through a history of the market and why he thinks it will continue to grow thanks to a series of major players that are introducing entirely new platforms that bring new capabilities into play.

Glu Mobile holds a 14% market share of the mobile games business, ranking second overall, he said, adding that the company ports 10 games to 10 different handset across the world every minute. “We sell games somewhere in the world every second,” he said.

“For those of us who’ve gotten to the top of the business, we think it’s a great business,” Ballard said.Many people say mobile games aren’t mass marketed yet because they only penetrate as little as 5% of all cellphones, he said, and even assuming it’s only reached that number, that still calculates to 165 million mobile gamers worldwide.

“The most recent data that I saw showed the number at 7 or 8%,” he said.“If you look just at that as an installed base for a platform you have to be pretty impressed,” Ballard continued. “We think it’s a very big business and we think it’s only going to get bigger.”

Major companies that have proven innovative prowess before, such as Google Inc., Nokia Corp., and Apple Inc., have all entered the market in the last several months, he said.“We think it’s going to change everything to be honest.”

Plenty of exciting new opportunities are going to come about quickly because of these new players, he said. The result will be nothing short of the “next wave of growth in the mobile business,” he added.