The freemium game market is insanely profitable – that is a fact. Recently we’ve reported on the first ever mobile game to gross over $1bn – Puzzle & Dragons, shortly followed thereafter by commuter/housewife favourite Candy Crush Saga (which did it in just one year). There’s no denying that if you want to make money, releasing your game for free and then putting up cynical in-game barriers demanding payment for progression is the way to go.
What has always stuck out as odd about these figures, though, is that no one actually seems to make these in-app purchases. Shy of perhaps occasionally paying to have advertising removed from inside a title, how often do you realistically make a real money purchase within a title? A quick survey of the What Mobile team has confirmed that none of us have ever made an in-app purchase. Ever. And we play an awful lot of mobile games (it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it).
Of course usually in a case like this it would be a simple example of confirmation bias – the idea that “I don’t do it, and none of my friends who are in the same demographic as me do it, therefore no one does it”, which would of course be wrong. But in this case, that’s actually what happens.
A report from in-app marketing company Swrve has shown that an incredible 50% of all in-app revenue is generated by purchases from just 0.15% of players.
The crazy figures don’t stop there, though. The other surprising statistic unveiled by Swrve is that 60% of the purchases made within the first two weeks of a player’s lifetime are made on the first day. In other words, if a player doesn’t immediately start coughing up the scratch, they might well never.
Whilst remarkable, these stats were collected over a relatively small sample size of 10 million players. If we apply the maths to a tangible example, Candy Crush Saga, things start to look at little more suspect. With Candy Crush Saga grossing $1bn over a player base of 500 million, that would mean that the 750,000 gamers constituting 0.15% would have to have spent $666.66 each on in-app purchases in their lifetime. Whilst it’s not an unbelievable number, it seems a little unlikely. Then again, 750,000 out of 500 million isn’t very many at all – perhaps there really are just that many insane Candy Crush fans.
To check out the details of the survey for yourself, take a look at the handy infographic below (be sure to click to enlarge).
