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 [...]
(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 [...]
I’ve stated a number of times that, within the context of the freemium model, retention is the most important metric a product manager must track; in the Minimum Viable Metrics methodology, retention is the top-most of the top-line metrics. Retention is not only a proxy measurement for customer delight, but it’s also the input for [...]
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 [...]
Some consider the price point of 0 to be the central operating principle of the freemium business model. And by this standard, any product for which the transaction cost is 0 (for at least some basic functionality) is, commercially, a freemium product. Pirated media and software would fall under this umbrella definition given the premise [...]
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 [...]
(Dashboard template can be found here; source code on GitHub here) In freemium mobile, my experience has been that the principles of the Minimum Viable Product as a product strategy are respected but sometimes necessarily abandoned because the concept isn’t perfectly transferable to mobile platforms. The MVP approach was designed for a platform (the web) that allows [...]
Today I gave a presentation called “Big Data in Mobile Gaming: Optimizing the User Experience” at IGExpo in Tallinn, Estonia. The aim of the presentation was to provide a general overview of how an analytics system can (should?) inform the development process, with some attention paid to defining various metrics and the process of data-driven [...]
That app discovery is broken isn’t in dispute within the mobile industry. The lack of adequate alternatives to native app store search has catalyzed the existence of a vast secondary market for mobile users; that market has become so competitive that studios without sizable balance sheets are precluded from participating in it. Industry giants are [...]
