Study: 5% of Mobile Gamers Willing To Spend $50+ 54
derGoldstein tips a story at AllThingsD about a study into mobile gamers' spending habits:
"[The study] provides a fairly compelling argument as to why a developer should continue to give away his or her games for free ... After evaluating the spending habits of 3.5 million consumers across both iOS and Android, Flurry found that among those who pay for in-app transactions, greater than five percent will spend more than $50, which rivals the amount paid at retail for top console and PC games."
In-Game Purchases (Score:1)
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Without it TF2 would have died long ago.
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It doesn't? Valve have ruined TF2 with their money-grabbing.
Oh no in-game purchases have made the game free, drawn tens of thousands of new players and also paid for the development of continued updates, equipment and maps keeping the game fresh. It's ruined I tell you, ruined!
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No they didn't. People who chose not to spend any money are not disadvantaged in any way whatsoever. You can make the argument that the game looks ridiculously silly now (in a good or bad way depending on whose opinion it is), but they didn't "ruin" the game. It's still as fun as its always been.
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It's deeper than just seeing silly hats. I haven't bought any of the new ray guns, but other
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Well it did totally ruin the design aesthetic. In the words of Yahtzee [wikia.com],
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Thanks for the link. Very interesting.
Re:In-Game Purchases (Score:5, Insightful)
In game purchases indeed.The "Study" is done by Flurry, an analytics company that market a system for in game currency.
In other news, McDonalds say that 90% of customers are willing to finish off their burger meal with a desert.
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Actually if you read the report, it's saying the opposite.
It's like an analyst saying, "5% of your customers will buy this ridiculous upsell, do not shove it in their face. Be reasonable with your expectations with inapp purchases."
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Strip the intros, outros, cut scenes, online play, and music. Compress the living shit out of the textures and sound. Bundle it all up into a lowly 100mb package and give it away.
Call this style a "game rip" and everyone is happy.
If you want the full game, buy it. I know I did
This means (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, but there are a whole lot more "gamers" on mobile phones than gamers in retails shops. So the 5% of gamers willing to pay $50 may very well be the same as the number of people actually paying for games in retail shops.
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The real point is: Are you better off selling 20 000 units of a $50 games or 2 000 000 units of a $0.5 games? The sheer visibility bonus of the second option alone makes me believe it's a better option.
The revenue is the same. Games requiring online servers need to be more beefed up, but as you pointed out, there is more content with 2M players than with 20K players... so it's for the game benefit.
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The model of the future - as we've heard EA wants to do with Madden, and presumably all companies would like to do with all games - is that you pay to subscribe, not to own the game.
So you pay $10 a month to play the game, you can't sell it to anyone else when you're done, you're subject to their terms of service AND you make in-game purchases.
The answer, according to the gaming industry's mad revenue scientists, is BOTH.
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And according to the children pirating everything left and right, people deserve to be entertained for free. The tension settles somewhere in the middle, just as it should.
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The real point is: Are you better off selling 20 000 units of a $50 games or 2 000 000 units of a $0.5 games? The sheer visibility bonus of the second option alone makes me believe it's a better option.
Keep in mind that you now have to provide support for 100x the number of users. If you're making a simple iPhone game that doesn't interact with anything else it's probably not a big deal. If you try that on PC, or in a game with a significant online component, you're going to be overwhelmed by the increased
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simple solution charge for support, I would not expect to ring up a help desk and speak to a person for a $0.50 game.
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You might not, but enough people do that you'll be impacted. You can do cheaper by having email support. But direct customer support isn't even the big concern - as I said before, think about games that interact with online servers. You need to maintain the servers and make sure they scale to match the userbase. If you're dealing with PC games, there will be compatibility issues you'll have to deal with.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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With digital distribution bringing unit costs to zero one can sell at an impulse buy price and rake in mountains of cash, simply by not being greedy twats.
This.
I probably own 25 games from http://www.gog.com/ [gog.com] and another 15-20 from Steam which I mainly bought because the price was somewhere south of a Big Mac and fried. I probably only played Cannon Fodder for 2 hours or so, but for a couple of dollars I couldn't care less.
I also buy a lot of older PS3 games second-hand, the most recent being Oblivion and Bioshock 1+2 (total cost: £12). I think by comparison the last full-price "AAA" title I bought was probably Half-Life 2.
I generally avoid games
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No need to get all verbal! Those greedy clueless companies will go belly up soon enough, and others with lower prices will replace them. The market will speak for itself.
If anything, Rovio clearly showed that these guys don't get it at all. They raked up more money with their game than any other company trying higher prices. The change has begun.
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If I log into GOG.com and go to my account, there are now almost a dozen games that I haven't played yet. They were so cheap that I bought them (mostly on half-price sales, so for about $2-3) thinking that I'd probably play them when I had some spare time and wanted entertaining. They're DRM free, so I'm confident that I'll be able to play them in the future, irrespective of what happens to the company - I still occasionally play some DOS games in DOSBox from companies that long since vanished. And, at t
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Gah, the hyperbole is ridiculous with you. Calm down on the "fucking" and the "assraping" talk. It's entertainment, not your blood. Whining that it costs too much to have every entertainment option you desire available to you at all times makes you just as much of a "twat" as those you excoriate. Your greed isn't any more moral than theirs.
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Yes, but there are a whole lot more "gamers" on mobile phones than gamers in retails shops. So the 5% of gamers willing to pay $50 may very well be the same as the number of people actually paying for games in retail shops.
Flawed logic right here.
You can't compare demographics like this because the study itself is already filtered to mobile gamers who are willing to spend money - a small subset of the population of mobile users, or mobile gamers.
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welcome to business in the 21st century. give away or sell at break even o 95% of people and upsell huge margin crap to the rest for the profits.
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Yes, but if you're a company who is in the business of selling games, do you care about 95% who will only pay $0.99 for a game worth fifty cents or the 5% of Apple users who are willing to pay $50.00 for a game worth a buck?
From the summary:
Anybody want to bet whether the pe
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Apple does rather have the monopoly for polishing a turd though. And every 9 months they roll it in glitter and sell it to their loyal user-base again.
1. Polish
2. Roll
3. Re-sell
4. Profit
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umm,
What makes you think that the publisher gets a cut of in-game sales?
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>>What makes you think that the publisher gets a cut of in-game sales?
I think his point was that they do at Gamestop, but not in-app.
*Apple* on the other hand might try to take a cut for in-App Store(tm) purchases.
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*Apple* on the other hand might try to take a cut for in-App Store(tm) purchases.
They don't try anything. They DO get 30% of all in-app purchases, which is a lot less than the cut in traditional distribution channels.
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A $50 game at Gamestop translates to $22 wholesale. If the developer got 15% that means they only get $3.30 a game. They don't need to be selling the game on mobile at $50 to make back their money.
In an arrangement like that, the publisher is going to be funding development up front. The developer gets a small cut because the publisher is taking the financial risk. Even if that game bombs, the developer received enough money to cover operating expenses for the development cycle.
If the developer is willing t
However, (Score:1)
... there is a +/- 5% margin of error.
5% of gamers maybe. But not even for 5% of games (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be honest here: 99.9something percent of the mobile games are nothing but more or less creative implementation of various flash games available from various flash game sites, mixed with cheap knockoffs and "kinda-sorta-like" versions of well known PC and console games.
50 bucks for that? Dream on!
I honestly wonder if those 5 percent think that 50 bucks would be a sensible price for Angry Birds and ... hell, whatever flavor of tower defense is the game of the month.
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Pretty much the same could be said for computer games in general.
Though it's gotten a lot better the past years due to bottom-up innovation.
Willing to is NOT "Will" (Score:2)
Hell, I'd be *willing* to spend $50 on a mobile game if it's good enough. I just cannot conceive of a game now that would be that good... does that put me in the 5%?
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They're study found 5% are willing to spend $50 on in-app purchases.
They're study did not find:
5% are willing to spend $50 on a game.
5% are willing to spend $50 on in-app purchases for a single game.
5% are willing to spend $50 on in-app purchases on a regular basis.
free OR $50, no middle ground? (Score:1)
People, RTFA (Score:3)
In other words, it is a micro-payment scheme. Give the main game away for free (like say Bloons, or Farmville), then charge people for add-ons.
The 95% of people that want the game but won't pay, get what they want. A playable game for free.
The 5% of people willing to pay for extra's, will pay a lot of money for them, far exceeding the small payments they could have gotten if they charged to download/continued use of the game.
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The idea behind this article is that, people are willing to pay $50+ in game, IF THE GAME IS FREE TO DOWNLOAD AND USE
In other words, it is a micro-payment scheme. Give the main game away for free (like say Bloons, or Farmville), then charge people for add-ons.
The 95% of people that want the game but won't pay, get what they want. A playable game for free.
The 5% of people willing to pay for extra's, will pay a lot of money for them, far exceeding the small payments they could have gotten if they charged to download/continued use of the game.
I wonder if the Smurfs game was included in this study. It is my understanding that people spent hundreds of dollars on this game. They did not "willingly" spend that money however. Must have Smurfberries. [msn.com]