The performance of Zynga’s stock in the almost two years since its IPO has chilled public markets ambitions for gaming companies. But two Western gaming developers, both of which have capably navigated a transition from Facebook (and other web-based platforms) to mobile, currently contend for the distinction of most likely to undertake the first post-Zynga [...]
One of the more difficult adjustments to make when transitioning from academia to industry is the change in vernacular required in communicating the machinations of models. In academia, the formatting and notations used generally indicate concepts that are taken for granted by the author and sometimes included only because, at a theoretical level, not including [...]
(The model referenced throughout this post can be downloaded here) Supercell’s recent $100mm secondary financing round raises some interesting questions about how mobile game developers capitalize on a hit game. A title in the Top 10 grossing chart for the US can, as evidenced by a number of recent high-profile examples, generate upwards of $500,000 [...]
The last country covered in the three-part overview of mobile gaming in Asia is Japan, which is fitting given the recent buzz around GungHo Entertainment, the Tokyo-based developer behind Puzzle & Dragons: last week it was reported that Japanese telecommunications firm SoftBank purchased a 58.5% stake in GungHo for $265 million. GungHo’s nearly half a [...]
Last month, Flurry Analytics projected a larger total smartphone and tablet install base in China than in the US (246 million versus 230 million). This usurpation of the top position is significant because 150 million of those nearly 250 million devices – or 60% – were added in 2012. China’s breathtaking pace of mobile device acquisition [...]
The macro trend playing out in mobile gaming over the past six months has been the shift away from casual gaming toward the mid-core experience: niche games driving high ARPU values through extended retention profiles and engagement metrics. You know a trend has breached the public consciousness when Forbes writes about it, which it did [...]
I wrote a few weeks ago about the importance of tracking a basic portfolio of metrics that I called Minimum Viable Metrics. I argued that this is especially important on mobile, where product iterations are necessarily less frequent than on the web because of platform idiosyncrasies. My point was that any iteration containing more than one [...]
One innovation the freemium model brings to bear is analytics as a fundamental component of the product development lifecycle: since distribution (and thus customer adoption costs) are 0, behavioral customer data is available with enough volume to develop new streams of revenue from it. The freemium model accords an analytics team the opportunity to conceptualize [...]
Download the model here (updated 20-03-2013) As free-to-play transitions from an emerging, vaguely defined abstraction into the dominant business model on mobile, developers will face an increasing need to understand the concept from an analytical standpoint. I spent some time this weekend thinking about how free-to-play games generate revenue: what mechanics converge to deliver positive ROI on the [...]
2012 was an encouraging year for the mobile gaming industry: total revenues swelled to $4.5 billion, the number of iOS devices ever sold reached approximately half a billion, and two studios proved that the free-to-play business model is not only sound, but that it can generate absurd amounts of money.
