By 2017, the global market for gaming is expected to reach $24 billion. For game developers it is useful to know what kind of game will get its fair share of that market. For the rest of us, knowing which games are most popular at least tells us a little bit more about ourselves and the world we live in.

Researchers at Flurry, a Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) company, have published new research about what types of mobile games people play in which countries. Some games have a global appeal, and others’ appeal is more local. Because the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has a larger global market the Flurry research restricted its study to Android devices.

The global average amount of time a person spends playing games on Android is 37 minutes a day. That number varies widely by country: U.S. gamers spend nearly 52 minutes a day playing games on their mobile phones, followed by German gamers who spend just over 47 minutes. The French and the Chinese spend the least amount of time among the top 10 gaming countries with 30 and 29 minutes respectively.

The kinds of games people play are divided into five categories: arcade and action games (think Angry Bird), brain and puzzle games, cards and casino games, casual games (the Sims) and sports games. Globally arcade/action games and casual games are the most popular categories in seven of the top 10 game-playing countries. Germans and Italians spend more time in brain and puzzle games, while South Koreans spend nearly 75% of their time playing arcade/action games on the social messaging platform Kakao.

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Here’s what Flurry says about frequency:

It turns out, Germans love puzzles and quizzes. The average gaming device in Germany has 66 monthly sessions in Brain & Puzzle games, 154% more than the worldwide average of 26. The hugely popular “4 Pics One Word” is from Germany after all.

Indians on the other hand get their kicks in Card Games, generating 119% more card gaming sessions than the global average. For the purpose of this analysis, card games include things like poker- or in this case, the local variant called teen patti (“three cards” in English). Solitaire is also very popular in India. Italians love word games, Brazil is nuts for fantasy football (soccer, that is), Russia goes for classic casual games with a physics element, and South Korea doesn’t play unless the game is on Kakao, and even then it’s simple arcade type games — the cuter the better.

The following chart from Flurry shows the percentage of Android gamers by category of games played at least once during the measurement period.

 

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