Global trends – Insights from 3 billion mobile gamers

[Music] way to hear some statistics but we're gonna try and go right through it so instead of kind of talking to you a whole bit about game analytics I'm gonna give you an idea of who we are by the scale of this benchmark this is the largest benchmark we've ever done on the mobile gaming industry so we covered 60,000 games across a full calendar year we cover major genres and the important thing about the one calendar year is that oh you can see all the seasonal trends so you have graphs in here from between kind of mid 2017 to mid 2018 we included about three billion devices

which to me like three million mobile phones is so crazy that we get to kind of see so many people in the network and is so much behavior but yeah let's dive right in so retention they won now obviously y'all know why retention day one is important if you're here um and this is one of my actually my favorite graphs to look at from this present because you'll notice well you know there's a 25% median they won retention for those of you who are maybe not kind of familiar with what is the median versus what is the average you the median is the actual middle point of the distribution so if you split all your data points into like the value that is right in the middle of it that would be the median the median so the interesting thing about this graph is if you look at the top performance top performers retention t1 is around 40% and this is kind of holds true with industry wisdom

right for a game to perform well he needs to have 40% or more than one retention that's fine bottom 15% of games of I think below 10% retention the interesting thing is this graph and this graph the median is right in the middle and that's very strange because the distribution of the industry is not an even distribution right it's not a bell curve it's more like a power curve a few titles who do really well and then you have a lot of titles who don't do all that well so what this actually tells you is a retention thing one if you look at it it will give you a lot of false positives it will show you some games that do well in the short term like they will do well one for the first 1/2 days but they will not necessarily do well overall so even though in a metric that everybody loves to use and they looks asked what's your day 1 retention and they focus less sometimes especially with you know tappers or hyper casual games they focus less on the long-term this actually shows you that it is important to put for the retention day

one into context and first of all also even though we spoke about 30 percent is you know tried-and-true industry wisdom it's interesting to look at this from a genre point of view and what actually that it really differs a lot by genre so trivia and word games actually great retention is more like 50% which is you know hold 25% they're like 1/4 compared to the you know overall rating the entire industry but you also have competitive genres like arcade board games card games so everything that you see on there on the left those are genres that definitely do very well and that are competitive and where if you want to get your game noticed you for be at the very top and then there are a few genres that actually do very well very poorly I guess kids education simulation you'll see throughout this talk that kids is pretty much to make a

game for kids is pretty much the worst decision so I'm not gonna keep pampering on about that but this is where you first see it ok so carrying on to put that into context with what I mentioned we're gonna go to retention day 7 and this is kind of similar like you see the same the same top performers in general and again just trivia and war games just slaying it they do perform so much better than all of the other genres notice that again good retention varies you have the industry wisdom again that sells you will top performing games have about 50 15 percent retention but again if you go back actually some genres have sent and some genres and actually a lot of genres have less than 15% so you get an average of 15 but that doesn't really give you the whole picture right so if you're going for a hyper casual hyper addictive game

you want to be actually above 15 in general and there's actually yeah it's interesting because you see five here on this screen but I see 15 on that one which is really strange anyway yes the median the median is 5% and like I said the top performers have 15% but the interesting thing is you start to see that the median moves downward right with this means that there are more values in the bottom than there are in the top so you start to see that compared to day one most games by day 7 would have separated and the ones that really do have they 7 retention are far fewer than those that actually just have high day one retention so you do start to see that power distribute another interesting thing that you see here is that right in the middle of the graph four top performers there is a dip that is generally the the holidays when you actually expect retention normally to

increase because people will be at home for Christmas it's when people start to try out more games so you would actually probably see your retention follow a bit over the Christmas period so for games that you launched right before that or for bills that you launched right before that you want to be careful and give them a bit of time in hurry to see how retention performs because over Christmas you are going to probably see lower numbers even if even if your game is really good right and put this into context we wanted to look at of course you know this is retention welcome back to the game but how much do you they do they actually also play once they are in the game and again the first thing we see is another interesting seasonal trend where playtime increases over the holiday so retention goes down more games but when they play they play more time on average another interesting thing from this graph is the seasonal trend is only in the top performers it's not in the bottom

performance performers as much so people don't like they'll not play just because they have more time on their hands like if you're hoping that the holidays will come and I'll get more players and you know I'm gonna see what's up and people are maybe gonna return no they're not people are gonna go back to the games they they love anyway so it it's quite a significant difference and also play times tends to be very high or my my perception for this as an industry average is that 12 to 15 minutes percent was was quite high and but there is again a very interesting difference by genre and this is one of the highest differences that we see where you see that some games casino and card games and there's also a lot of overlap between dollars they have really high session lengths so they have session lengths of over 30 minutes whereas and then there's another group of genres like or what I call core like genres

like casual education multiplayer puzzles people play with their friends or games that they can spend a lot more time in and then hyper casual genres across the board have lower session length and the interesting thing about session length is this is not I think generally higher session litter as a rule but depending on the style of game people will only spend so much time in your game right it's very rare that any of us play a tapper for 30 minutes you would play during your community you would play and you know it'll be a snackable experience this kind of aligns with that that depending on the genre of games what is what is a high session length is is very different and you can't really take the the industry average to necessarily be meaningful for your game you put it into context of what yours onra is and the combined of so a metric that I look at as the combined value with the kind of a good

measure kind of everything in one go is stickiness and the reason I like stickiness is when stickiness I don't know it's also called doubt to Mau ratio when stickiness is one it means if you had a hundred players today all of these hundred players were also here every day for the past thirty days and only they were here so it means that the ratio between today's players and your monthly uniques is that would make it one so stickiness tells you out of all the people that you brought in the past thirty how many are playing today right and I find it to be a very useful metric because a lot of the time would retention and ease you focus on okay retention they seventh a wandering whatever but at the end of the day how many people do you still have today out of all the people that you into your game you know this month and the stickiness tells you exactly that and interestingly a stickiness is most similar to retention day seven and when

I kind of first looked at stickiness I was expecting it to be more to retention day 28 or day 30 but obviously when you think about it it makes sense that it's similar to day seven because what it really tells you is that you know games that are repeatable in nature that you play either on your complain on your weekend those are the games that generally tend to have high stickiness that you tend to go back to if a game does not reach those patterns and it does not get like a 1 to 5 1 to 7 ratio of players that come back it's not a very addictive game and people you're gonna be dropping people too fast to make it to make it profitable the another interesting thing is I did this a similar talk to this last year on the stats that we had an overall stickiness was actually lower in top performers it was 14 16% and now it's gone up to 20% so I there's a question

of what why is that the composition of things that we measure changed the composition of the industry change my explanation for this is that there is now a very high volume of games that are highly highly addictive right because I think we are seeing in stickiness the rise of high will as well where you get games they're very addictive have greatly one day seven retention and they impact as a whole the whole industry because they have so much volume of players however stickiness for the worst games is the same so some people people didn't and yeah it's interesting to see that kind of industry is going upwards not necessarily going downwards okay so this this kind of show the comparison between stickiness and retention that they're almost the same and again trivia and word games are killing it kind of casual like games

doing super well so the same games formed a performing tension board card Casino puzzle and so on now I'm guessing the question is okay this is people coming back into the game the these are the most competitive genres but what does this mean for your Studios revenue and for your Studios bottom line and okay I I wanted to look a bit our pool and art Dow I'm not sure if you guys can see the numbers on here very well but essentially higher is somewhere between twenty twenty-five thirty dollars that is what kind of top performing art poo is and top performing Dow is between fifteen cents eighteen cents now the interesting thing that I found here is that if you actually comes to and you assume that the top performers would be the same you would need an 0.7% conversion to get from one to the other and I personally thought that's quite

low I mean I would expect the top performer to have conversion that an 0.7% so I thought well what what does that mean why does that happen and I looked at they leak I'm very yearly conversion I thought that death can't be the top conversion and actually it's a top conversion is between 1 percent and 1.2 percent and the takeaway for that for me is that not necessarily all games that games that are good at converting are not necessarily actually the games that are the most which is which is a interesting insight but yes top conversion is above 1% and again top ARPU games they are not always the top converters and but we'll go a bit into that by genre and we'll look at win by when does it apply when does it not but I guess my essential takeaway from this is that you can have a strategy that it is based on Wales so you maybe don't

have to be as great as at converting as long as when people come for a lot of money or you can have a strategy that is based on on micro transactions but all of this is highly dependent on the genre that that you choose and these are the most some of the more interesting genre differences that that we have in in the presentation so probably unsurprisingly the games that perform best and that actually have great our food and our cow or our Fijian strategy so core games that are highly dependent on monetization where people tend to spend fairly high amounts but the interesting thing when you compare the two graphs is whereas with our poo most of the genres kind of have respectable performance relative to casino RPG and strategy which are the ones they very top what ARP tau it's far more skewed it's like RPG and strategy and everybody else right so I wanted to look a bit more

into that and I wanted to kind of put conversion to have conversion as of a contrast to see why is art thou low is it because these games are not converting at the same rate and why is it that more games have farmers in our food and then have top performers in in our town and conversion paints some of this picture where you see that conversion is almost like a transition graph between the two it's it kind of shows that strategy again do well not as well perhaps compared to relatively the others as as ARP Tao but you can see that most most genres still are in the 1% almost or close to 1% ratio that would require needed for top performers so I felt that this was still kind of I don't know not enough to explain the difference between the two so I came up

with my my own explanation yes because sometimes the numbers don't tell you anything or and don't tell you everything and my explanation for this is that what we're looking at here is actually the difference between IP only games and games that and genres that monetize more with ads as well so you would see it strategy would be genres that generally are IEP driven they would have maybe some rewarded video but they would probably they would probably not have a strategy that is very dependent on Nats not to the same level as casual games where however when when there is there are games that want to monetize using IEP they can have solid ARPU install if conversion so it is possible to monetize that way but for the majority of glad they use a combined strategy that is part ads part in approaches and that's where you kind of see the gap where in all the casual Jean Rah's or casual like or hyper or hypo

casual like genres ARP Dow is very low because the earnings that you have just from an app purchase paint only I guess half half of the picture it doesn't mean the older genres are not making money for their users just that in that purchases do not capture all the money and I would actually love to give you some attitudes but we don't have the annotation we're gonna work on on a follow-up later this year and we're gonna look a bit more into that but generally my takeaway from this is that it's still in terms of monetization some genres are still going strong with IEP because you can see that there is a shift across the whole genre to more complex way of monetizing or to mixed levels of modernization and we're almost done so overall takeaways genre that performs well across everything casino games so if if you want to make money first and follow your

passion later probably casino games are a great bet to start kind of may be profitable game people are highly engaged they have the highest session lengths they have some of the highest retention they have some of the highest in a nap spend definitely it's a good shanwa for monetize do you want to make games that people really love come coming back to even though you may earn less per player but where you can go with a volume strategy you can go forward or trivia games retention is through the roof ARP Dow is generally lower but you can go for volume and still you know have a minnow strategy make mess less money per player but sort of a ton of players if you really want to have a game that is very complex the game that you yourself love to play you can go for strategy or RPG they are hard Chandra's in volume they are lower than other genres but when you get it right there the reward is very high it's a very high-risk high-reward strategy a

high-risk high-reward strategy it's generally low retention people mean back to your game but if you do get a set of highly engaged gamers they will probably spend a lot of money in your game to keep their community going but if you do want to make just kind of a general will around the game start off apply industry business then you know a casual arcade puzzle puzzle game is probably like a good compromise between I don't want to make a casino game but I don't want to make a game super fancy kind of strategy game either so definitely that would be a great pick yeah that's it for me do we get you in [Applause] um so is there any there's a lot of comprehensive stats today there's any questions there's a gentleman there looks familiar

hello hello very hurry yeah do you have the annual these are those like global or is it like do those very country by country for example the deep after Christmas period you use it that there's like annual beeps and changes yes others global trends or is in Asia they are not as big as in Europe or for example so I think I mentioned that the proportion of players that we have from Asia in this study is about 20% yes you have I mean obviously the we actually have a benchmark on China only if you go to the game analytics website it's there in our resources page but yes over there the trend shifts and it's related to Chinese New Year and much less to Austin holidays however this is across our entire network so at a global level it seems that the Western holiday trend kind of drowns out a bit like the

Christian holiday trip kind of trying drowns out the Asian trend a bit um we it our distribution or our coverage is better overall in in North America and in Europe so that that is another explanation so that's about like 50% versus 20% in in Asia right so you would you would see the impact [Music]