It's no secret that in the mobile games industry securing a top slot on cell phone decks can make all the difference to a particular title's success or failure. As EA Mobile Senior VP Mitch Lasky explained in his GDC Mobile keynote, the top 200 games generate 93 percent of revenue today. Today the results of a study by mobile research firm Telephia shed further light on the positions of mobile game titles for top carriers.

Telephia's newly launched Deck Monitoring Report, part of the firm's Audience Metrics product suite, shows that more than 20 percent of the top deck slots across the major carriers are occupied by poker game titles. In fact, throughout February and early March, Telephia's data indicates that the top four carriers in the U.S.—Cingular, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile—had at least two different poker titles on their top 15 bestsellers list. In addition, three out of four carriers had at least one poker title in their "featured" deck.

While card and casino games like poker may be one of the most popular, when it comes to generating revenue the card/casino genre represented 17 percent of revenue share in the U.S. in January, according to Telephia. The Puzzle/Strategy genre brought in more money overall with 29 percent of revenue share. Part of this was a direct result of the average price paid, which was $4.69 for Puzzle/Strategy and only $3.85 for Card/Casino. Of course, games like Tetris remain to this day extremely popular, so these findings aren't that surprising.

Rounding out the top five in January after Card/Casino was Action/Adventure with 13 percent of revenue share at an average price of $4.37, Sports/Racing at 12 percent and an average price of $4.44, and Trivia/Word at 10 percent and an average price of $3.38.

Following January, Telephia also said it observed a spike in mobile Winter Olympic Games titles during the February-March period. Most notably, there were eight such titles appearing in the top slots of game decks during the second week of the Olympics, and then this trend started declining during March when a similar surge occurred with NCAA basketball titles, thanks to March Madness.

With trends changing from week to week, it's important for mobile publishers to know when to push for top placement. Telephia's new Deck Monitoring Report could potentially be very useful as it "measures change in positions for mobile game titles across 12 different decks for top carriers, providing information on current game position, number of weeks on specific decks, and changes in rankings from week to week."

"Most cell phone decks are updated weekly, if not more frequently and it is important for content providers to understand how the shifting, dynamic environment impacts their bottom line," said Kanishka Agarwal, Vice President of New Products, Telephia. "Cell phone real estate is valuable property and location can make or break the success of a game title."