I quite like mobile gaming. It passes odd bits of time and can actually be pretty good for anxiety; simple games with colourful dots are stress free but require enough concentration that you have to stop thinking about whatever is frying your noggin at the time. However, as much as I’m partial to switching my brain off, I can’t imagine ever being actively bothered enough to spend money on them. When I was watching Channel 4’s new ‘survival’ show, Eden, I noticed an advert for a mobile game based on the show that got me thinking – that’s a lot of effort to go to… How much money are people actually spending on these games?
Obviously they do make money, but until I did a bit of research I wasn’t aware just how much money that is. In 2014, 92% of the revenue brought in from the games section of the Apple App Store came from free games with in-app purchases. Looking more recently at March 2016, the highest earner was Game of War – Fire Age, which was bringing in £1,088,463 per DAY. In 2014, at what I assume was the peak of it’s popularity, the Guardian reported that Candy Crush Saga players spent over $1.3 billion… So, late to the party, but realising how much dollar there is being spent I got to wondering – who are the people with enough disposable income to be spending that much on 'lollipop hammers?'
I can’t imagine it’s people like me. I’m pretty lucky in that I get paid for writing about things that I find interesting, and while I’m not exactly balling around town blowing my nose on fivers, I know there are a lot of people my age who are still trying to break into the industry they want – let alone getting paid for it. With that being said, my monthly budget just doesn’t stretch to spending large chunks of money on digital paintbrushes or coins or unlimited lives… It has to be people with loads of money, but equally I can’t imagine wildly wealthy executives actually giving a shit about what level of Papa Pear they’re on. Perhaps I am naïve.
Thickening the plot, it turns out that most of the revenue being raked in by the game companies actually comes from a tiny percentage of players. In fact, HALF of the money made from in-app purchases is from just 0.15% of people, according to app testing firm Swrve, as reported by Re/code. In the same article, they tell a story from a Japanese game company, who had one player spending around $10,000 per month on in-app purchases. This one 'whale' was such a lucrative customer that the company assigned an employee especially to make sure that she was always happy with her experience and continuing to game a.k.a. spend tens of thousands of dollars. WHAT IS HER JOB? The mind boggles.
So – it seems like it’s probably not your average Debrief reader who’s out there frittering away her hard earned cash – but these people are out there. Like weird superheroes they sit quietly in offices and on the bus, clicking buy and funding a multi billion dollar industry. There are other things I’d rather be spending my disposable income on if I had that much to play with, but I suppose, equally, they’re not doing anybody any harm. Think it might be time to consider a new career as a ‘freemium’ app developer…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.