Many of our mobile phones have become another gaming device pulling us further away from social interaction or just compounding on that awkward date when we get in a quick round of Clash Royale. With technology improving so fast we are now able to play games that are engaging and have decent graphics. The most popular game type are what are being called freemium. These are your games with zero price entry but in-game items can be purchased to either improve your own ability to play or unlock additional content.
If you think about how many games are out there and how many you have put on your phone and never paid for you might be wondering how these games survive. According to a study by Swrve only 0.15% of mobile gamers contribute to 50% of the mobile market income in 2014. In fact according to the study less the 2% of players ever pay for anything.
There are could be exceptions to this average with games like Clash Royale made by Supercell. In 2016 they posted a revenue of $2.3 billion.(venturebeat.com) They don't release their numbers so we don't know if that was Clash of Clans or Clash Royale and how many people are spending money on the game. This too is the case with Niantic and Pokemon GO, with their estimated one billion dollars in revenue.(techcrunch.com) Another honorable mention is Mario Run, where Nintendo said about 5% of people the 78 million downloads paid the full $10 for the game.(theverge.com)
Things do not seem to be slowing down either. There is a lot of money in mobile games. In fact in 2016 games accounted for 90% of the revenue in Google Play.(androidauthority.com) The trend seems to be going up with over 200 thousand games being released on iOS last year.(blog.appfigures.com) While we can assume many of these games will fail we can also hope we might have some new stand outs this year as well.
Even outside of freemium games we have had breakaway titles like Crashlands, The Escapist, and Monument Valley. Monument Valley was offered for free a few times but still managed to make $14 million before that.(polygon.com) These titles and more showing the mobile market as a viable place to make games.
While there are a plethora of successful mobile games we have to remember it only looks like that because there are so many. Only a few ever turn into titans with the actual financial support of a few players. The rest just load to our phone only to be uninstalled soon after. Even if we do play them, rarely do mobile users reach into their pockets like we see on other platforms.
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