Crunching the numbers offers a variable picture.
Apple launched its Game Center connected gaming community for iPhone and iPod touch in early September, as part of its iOS 4.1 software. So how's it doing?
The company has not provided any official figures, but there is a certain amount of transparency built in to Game Center, since on your device, its app shows the number of connected players for each game.
ME did some number-crunching, pulling out the stats for 20 of the games on our iPhone, and comparing them where possible to publicly-announced sales figures for those games.
The idea: to see if any conclusions can be drawn about Game Center's popularity - if x people have bought a game, and y of them are counted in its Game Center leaderboards, then perhaps the percentage of iOS users who've signed up for Apple's community is z.
In a word, no. The data is interesting, but defies any attempts to make such general conclusions.
Article continues belowAdvertisement
Here's the raw figures, with the most recent sales stats where available (and for those games, the percentages of their players who are Game Centered up):
Note, this is not 'The Top 20 Game Center games' - it includes all the big GC-enabled titles, but is more a sampling of our collection than an attempt to chart every single game in order.
Take the two Chillingo games at the top of the list, though. New title Cut the Rope, which passed one million downloads late last week, appears to have more than 63% of those players on Game Center.
However, Angry Birds - which recently introduced Game Center features - has just over 24% - although that's still comfortably enough to make it the most popular Game Center game.
Other points: Flight Control appears to have nearly 17% of its players signed up to Game Center, but Fruit Ninja is only just over 6%. We suspect StarDunk has a much higher percentage, since the game is built around online play.
Zynga appears to have healthy connected communities for its two games, FarmVille and Word Scramble Challenge.
However, lower numbers for older iOS games like Touchgrind, Enigmo, Fieldrunners and Cro-Mag Rally indicates that either people aren't playing these games much any more, or they haven't signed up for Game Center.
Diner Dash's figure deserves caution - developer PlayFirst announced that two million people had 'played' it on iPhone and iPod touch, but that may include the free Lite version, which is presumably not Game Center-friendly.
In any case, using the Angry Birds figure as a base, it seems likely that Game Center members are already in the low millions.
