Gameloft Made $25 Million From The App Store Last Year

French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.

The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million).

Gameloft withdrew from boxed games in January 2009, and says mobile games accounted for 94% of the company’s sales for the whole year. The remaining 6% are related to consoles game sales.

Full-year revenues from the mobile game segment grew by 12%, self-reportedly due to the success of the games the company distributes through Apple’s App Store. To demonstrate its growing importance for the company, you need only look at revenue figures for the fourth quarter of 2009: iPhone revenues for the company reached €7 million ($9.75 million), while initial expectations were €4.4 million.

Total Q4 2009 sales reached €31.8 million ($44.5 million), which means revenues from the App Store are currently about 22% of the company’s total revenue.

Last week, Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot was quoted as saying that he regards the iPad as massive new opportunity for game developers, and to ’stay tuned’ for upcoming announcements on iPad-specific video games.

Gameloft was founded by the Guillemot brothers, founders and owners of video games leader Ubisoft, and has partnership agreements with carriers, handset manufacturers, specialized distributors in over 100 countries. The company employs some 3,500 developers around the world. For a comprehensive list of games developed by Gameloft, head on over to their Wikipedia profile.

Source : Techcrunch, 2/02/10