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Mobile games industry news round up for w/e 12 July 2013
Key insights
6 takeaways- 01The barrier to entry for spending is significant; once a player makes an initial in-app purchase, 50 percent complete a second transaction within one hour.
- 02Despite the dominance of free-to-play, some developers continue to achieve success with premium, paid-upfront titles such as Plague Inc.
- 03Industry discourse as of July 2013 shows a strong shift toward free-to-play models, with leaders actively criticizing hybrid pricing structures that combine low entry costs with aggressive in-app purchases.
- 04Tablet users monetize at a rate three times higher than smartphone users, indicating that device form factor and usage context are primary drivers of player spending.
- 05Initial monetization is critical, as Amazon data shows 16 percent of a player's total lifetime value is generated within the first 24 hours of a game download.
- 06As of the Apple App Store's five-year anniversary in July 2013, the mobile gaming industry is increasingly prioritizing data-backed monetization strategies to maximize user lifetime value.
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Transcript
hello this is john jordan from pocketgamer.biz this is our weekly roundup of the news for the week ending the 12th of july 2013. it's been a pretty busy week for for uh pocket gaming as we were down at the uh develop in brighton conference which is the big uk um european uh game conference for the summer um lots of things going on there keith was very busy going around and kind of writing up all the talks it's kind of a good it's kind of a busy time busy three days but if you get a good kind of cross-section of what's going on particularly attitudes to game developers um there's some pretty interesting ones there was the uh the um five-proof games who made the box obviously massive success a paid game no inapp purchases quite going against the model i did a talk with uh with james vaughan who uh created the plague inc again um that was a 99 cent game this one had inapproaches well we were talking a bit more about the science science behind the uh kind of the plague and kind of how you try and kill the world with diseases kind of pleasant stuff um another another kind of a well-known
face in the industry uh jason aven from um uh boss alien games who made csr racing he's always kind of up for up for a fight um when it comes to kind of controversy and he was uh very much talking about the importance of free to play games and he was actually slagging off what he calls cheap um games which are games where you pay 99 cents for and then having that purchase and he sees that as really um kind of going against the grain um imagination was something i was looking at as well i'm kind of coming up with it or trying to come up with the process of a ranking free to play efficiencies or free to play the aggressiveness of free to play kind of uh economies in games um you'll be reading a lot more about that i hope over the coming months um but uh aside from develop there's a lot of things happening in the world obviously the uh apple's app store was uh five years old this week um had some interesting comment from oscar clark who has been in the industry for a long time very outspoken very thoughtful as well um and he not an apple fanboy whatsoever he was talking um about how the how the app store has changed industry in in many good ways
which um he doesn't uh always always uh want to say that with grapple because that was interesting and there's coming some interesting numbers actually coming out of um some develop and somehow kind of the wider industry this week so we saw one as you've kind of seen before uh or trend we've seen before so play first did some surveys of its players and it was saying three times more three times higher level of monetization on tablet players as phone players which is perhaps something we'd expect um with just the demographics between those two platforms um another quite interesting one from um amazon which is actually the develop talk where they said 16 of their of the lifetime value of a play that they were seeing was happening in the first day of download which is i think surprising i think people expect to see a bit um happen a bit later in in the process of of players um and perhaps the most interesting thing again from amazon they were saying after someone's made a purchase in a game within an hour 50 of them make another purchase so i guess that's kind of looking towards this kind of psychology kind of what's going on with players and at least half of them when they've spent some money to
buy an item in the game or or increase their progressions with the game they've enjoyed that experience in there and they're and they're happy to kind of pay again so um so yeah that was kind of what happened this week catch you next week you
Summary
The mobile gaming landscape as of mid-July 2013 reflects a pivotal shift in monetization strategies and platform performance. Industry discourse, highlighted by the Develop in Brighton conference, centers on the tension between premium pricing models and the increasingly dominant free-to-play ecosystem. While some developers continue to find success with paid titles like Plague Inc., industry leaders are actively advocating for free-to-play structures, criticizing hybrid models that combine low entry costs with aggressive in-app purchases.
Data-driven insights from the period underscore significant differences in player behavior across devices and platforms. Tablet users demonstrate a monetization rate three times higher than that of smartphone users, suggesting that screen size and usage context significantly influence spending habits. Furthermore, Amazon’s internal data reveals that 16 percent of a player’s total lifetime value is generated within the first 24 hours of downloading a game, challenging the assumption that monetization peaks later in the player lifecycle.
Psychological factors play a critical role in sustaining revenue, as evidenced by the high velocity of repeat transactions. Among players who make an initial in-app purchase, 50 percent complete a second transaction within one hour. This trend suggests that once the initial barrier to spending is removed, players are highly inclined to continue investing in their progression or experience. As the Apple App Store marks its five-year anniversary, these findings collectively point toward a maturing industry that is increasingly reliant on sophisticated, data-backed monetization strategies to maximize the value of its user base.
