“The app market has been candy crushed”: Observed and rationalized processes for selecting smartphone games

•Mobile gaming via smartphones is an economically robust sector of the larger video games market, yet little is know about how these games are selected by users.•Available as smartphone applications (“apps”), mobile games complete with hundreds of thousands of other apps for consumers’ attention.•The current study analyzes observed decision-making behaviors of a small sample of US and German smartphone users, combined with follow-up interviews.•Participants tended to (1) evaluate only one game, (2) spend little time evaluating that game before downloading it, and (3) based this decision on familiarity or price considerations (with both implicitly based on rating).•Classic motivations for playing console and computer video games were never mentioned by any study participants, suggesting mobile gaming to be a qualitatively different experience.•Privacy concerns associated with smartphone gaming were rarely mentioned, and only by German users.

Industry estimates suggests that smartphone gaming – playing video games on smartphone device, accessed via the device’s app market – accounts for a growing segment of the entire video game play market. Yet, very little is known about the processes by which smartphone users search for and download these gaming apps. Exploratory data combining behavioral observation with post-behavior talk aloud sessions found that users tended to (1) evaluate only one game, (2) spend little time evaluating that game before downloading it, and (3) based this decision on familiarity or price considerations (with both implicitly based on rating). Privacy concerns were rarely mentioned, and classic motivations for video gameplay (such as challenge, competition, and socialization) were not represented. These data suggest that smartphone gaming might be a qualitatively different experience in terms of its uses and effects than other forms of gaming and mobile entertainment.