Virtual Goods Revenues Rise for Mobile Players. Virtual goods spending is on a steady growth trajectory according to eMarketer estimates, and research shows that around the world mobile will begin contributing significantly to this trend. Juniper Research reported estimates in October that worldwide virtual goods revenues for items purchased on mobile social media would reach $3 billion this year and rise to $4.6 billion by 2016. As mobile virtual goods purchases rise, those on other types of games may be stalling. Players of casual online games, for example, have reported a decrease in median spending on virtual goods items, probably as the novelty of spending money on otherwise free social games has worn off. But other, more hardcore gamers, have continued spending on the desktop as more casual players have turned to mobile for their virtual fix. Research from social gaming firm Kabam also supports the idea that hardcore gamers will continue to provide a significant share of this revenue.
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Playfish - misc. SCRUM / Agile Development. Mobile Gaming. Business Model - Monetization, scalibility, advertising. Social Gaming - Playfish / Facebook. Game metrics - Analysis. Playfish In Numbers Infographic: Online Gaming Is Bigger Than You Think! A new infographic released today by Playfish is proving that online gaming is bigger than you might think. Would you believe that if all the Playfish gamers lived in one country it would have a population bigger than England? It’s true, along with a ton of other surprising facts illustrated on the ‘Playfish In Numbers’ infographic. ‘Playfish In Numbers’ offers great examples to help you wrap your head around the sheer numbers of gamers playing all sorts of Playfish games, from Restaurant City to Madden NFL Superstars, Pet Society, My Empire, EA Sports FIFA Superstars, and Hotel City.
The stats are pretty impressive. Check out the infographic below and let us know what you think. Playfish Social Games Reaching 55 Million Monthly Players. Electronic Arts-owned social games developer Playfish revealed that its games are played by over 55 million people every month, as well as other statistics about its releases. Tracking site AppData shows that Playfish's games reach a total of nearly 37.7 million monthly players on Facebook alone, but the company's titles are available on other platforms, too, such as MySpace.
The developer points out its games have been installed 340 million times around the world. Playfish says more than 90 million virtual items are transacted daily in its games, which it claims is nine times more than the 10 million items eBay sells on any given day. In Pet Society, its most popular social game, users have purchased over 187 million pairs of shoes and 1.7 billion apples in-game. +++ Playfish's Social Gaming Architecture. Ten million players a day and over fifty million players a month interact socially with friends using Playfish games on social platforms like The Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone. Playfish was an early innovator in the fastest growing segment of the game industry: social gaming, which is the love child between casual gaming and social networking.
Playfish was also an early adopter of the Amazon cloud, running their system entirely on 100s of cloud servers. Playfish finds itself at the nexus of some hot trends (which may by why EA bought them for $300 million and they think a $1 billion game is possible): building games on social networks, build applications in the cloud, mobile gaming, leveraging data driven design to continuously evolve and improve systems, agile development and deployment, and selling virtual good as a business model. How can a small company make all this happen? Site: playfish.com Stats Platform Key Forces What are the key forces that shape Playfish's architecture? Microtransactions in Games - Blogcritics Gaming. How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model i.
Click to download Freemium spreadsheetBackground on this discussion Last year, the stupendous Daniel James co-hosted a talk with me on Lifetime Value metrics for subscription and virtual goods-based items. You can see the video/outline for the talk, Daniel’s commentary, and a mindmap of the talk (scroll to the bottom of the post). As part of the talk, we worked on a spreadsheet model for freemium businesses that we didn’t get enough time to work on – so I’m going to cover it in this post! If you haven’t gotten the spreadsheet yet, here’s another link to it. Here are the questions this post (and the spreadsheet) is meant to answer: What are the key factors that drive freemium profitability?
How do freemium businesses acquire customers? What are the drivers of customer lifetime value? If these questions interest you, keep reading :-) Article summary (for people with attention deficit!) Lifetime value > Cost per acquisition + Cost of service (paying & free) Now for all the gory details…