Angry Birds maker Rovio’s decision to lay off 38% of its staff is the latest reminder that the mobile games industry can be a brutally unforgiving industry, even if the £865m spent by players on Candy Crush Saga in 2014 shows that the rewards for success can be huge.
Now new research from mobile analytics firm App Annie has shed more light on the path to success for successful mobile games, including the claim that while their downloads tend to peak soon after launch, their revenues peak much later.
The company analysed nearly 20,000 mobile games on Apple’s iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play store, tracking their downloads and revenues over the five years to June 2015.
Its report claims that around 30-35% of those games reached more than 1m downloads, while 15% of those reached 10m downloads. Meanwhile, 10-15% of the games generated more than $1m of revenues, while 20% of those went on to gross $10m.
Those calculations should not be applied to the wider app stores: App Annie chose its sample from “top-performing apps”, so its findings do not prove that 2% of all iOS and Android games make more than $10m.
The research does provide more information on how those successful games build their businesses, though. Of the iOS games that reached 1m downloads, 33% did so in their first month, with a median time of 98 days to reach that milestone.
It took longer to reach $1m in revenues: a median of 156 days for the iOS games. On Google Play, the median time to reach 1m downloads was 69 days, while for $1m of revenues it was 159 days.
“It appears that successful iOS games peaked early by downloads but grew daily revenue over time as accumulated downloads contributed to the size of a game’s active user base,” claims App Annie. “Since 2012, the pattern was largely similar on Google Play.”
The report also identified the huge lifespan of some of the most lucrative mobile games. Japanese game Puzzle & Dragons, for example, spent more than 1,200 days as one of the five top-grossing iOS games worldwide, and more than 1,000 days in a similar position on Google Play.
“In comparison, blockbuster movies like Titanic and Avatar remained Top 5 grossing movies for <150 days and <100 days, respectively,” claims the report.
While comparisons between apps and movie takings seem to be all the rage in 2015, they are often a case of apples and oranges. While films are finished products designed to make money from several stages of formats and release windows – cinema, DVD, video-on-demand and so on – successful mobile games are designed to be played every day, with new features and content added regularly.
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