Apple dominating Android with 84 percent of mobile gaming revenue | Hacker News Reader

Apple dominating Android with 84 percent of mobile gaming revenue

venturebeat.com

16 pointsrmah26 comments

According to Newzoo, in-app purchases are where developers are really seeing the money. Ninety-one percent of mobile gaming revenue comes from money spent inside the game on both Android and iOS.

Freemium is king. Unfortunately this model usually incentivizes the wrong kind of game design. The top ten tends to be dominated by Skinner boxes selling virtual tchotchkes.

Other headline: Playing games on Android is cheaper.

This is an excellent point. I hate this Forbsian POV here of how making the most money is the most important thing ever. I had an iphone for a while and felt forced into buying 99 cent apps for basic usage. On android, a lot of this stuff is free. Maybe android appeals to people who don't feel blowing $100 on apps or in game items is acceptable. Regardless, I don't see android or its app selection hurting because of it.

Not to mention, android appeals to power users who probably have a xbox or gaming PC anyway. If I'm going to be stuck in a skinner box for hours, I'd prefer the one with the big screen and the slick graphics.

It depends on which side you are on :) You might love to buy android phone but will you develop for it knowing it wont bring as much money...

A friend went back to iPhone because there was no option to buy angry birds at the time. Paying X to avoid advertising popup's is a feature many people want.

Your friend went back to the iPhone because Angry Birds has ads? Everybody seems to have his own priorities.

Honestly, I'd be willing to pay more for games if it meant there was a better selection of high quality games to pay for. Android is somewhat lacking in this department.

Honestly, I'd be willing to make more games for Android if my games weren't completely drowned out by the insane volume of utter shite pumped onto the Android Market.

Third headline: People buy iPhones to play games, only company that really cares is Nintendo

What about in-app ads? Lots of Android games have built-in ads that bring revenue for the developer without the need for the user to purchase anything. I remember that the original Angry Birds used to be free on the Android Market but displayed ads, while the iOS App Store version cost a dollar.

>What about in-app ads? Lots of Android games have built-in ads that bring revenue for the developer without the need for the user to purchase anything. I remember that the original Angry Birds used to be free on the Android Market but displayed ads, while the iOS App Store version cost a dollar.

Apps don't make anything near what an actual purchase does. Plus, nobody looks at ads when he plays a game...

Except Angry Birds was projected at one point to be making $1MM a month on Android[1]. Maybe ads don't bring in as actual purchases overall, but I think it's a bit premature to totally exclude it.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds-android-1-milli...

At our local Android developer's meet-up, we had a local game developer who has released several paid and ad-supported games. There are two relevant observations he made:

1. He often made more money from the ad-supported free versions of his games rather than the paid versions.

2. The Play Store is not the only place to download/pay for Android games. According to him, there are hundreds of alternative markets (such as Amazon's), some of which are much more prevalent outside the U.S.

I don't know why this was downvoted, but I think it's a good anecdote, as (depending on the type of the game and on the type of marketing preferred) developers could see more revenue from ads than from upfront or in-app payments.

Therefore any measurements should count revenues based on ads too, at least on Android where the freemium model is often preferred.

Also, point #2 is very valid. Besides alternative app stores, developers on Android can also self-publish on their own website and experiment with various kinds of payment. See for instance The Humble Bundle, which allows people to pay how much they want (much like donations) and which had a nice return until now ...

http://www.humblebundle.com/

>1. He often made more money from the ad-supported free versions of his games rather than the paid versions.

Besides being just one account, that might as well be because, well, his paid versions didn't sell that well at all?

My experience is roughly the same. We aren't making hugely popular apps, but in all cases, the ad-supported version generates more revenue than the pay versions.

I think at this point Apple is holding carriers hostage in most parts of the world, and they are demanding they buy a certain amount of iPhones from them (at the full retail price) before the launch, otherwise they don't give them the iPhone.

So at least for a few years, Apple could just keep increasing profits, by demanding the carriers buy 30% (or whatever) more units each time, and ride that business model for a long time, until the iPhone is not a popular item anymore.

If the other manufacturers want to make some decent profit, besides making great products, obviously, they also need to be more forceful towards carriers, and also demand full retail price for their phones, rather than a heavily discounted price for "volume" or whatever reasoning carriers have when dealing with the other manufacturers. Those $600-$700 Android smartphones you see in store at carriers, they pay only $400-$450 for them. Manufacturers need to stop this practice if they want higher profits.

There is some truth in this, as based on my own experience, there are more quality games in iTunes then there are in Google Play ... or maybe the Play store simply sucks for discoverability of interesting games. And when I did find some quality games, some of them performed poorly on my Galaxy S1, probably because of the slightly outdated hardware.

On the other hand counting the total revenue of Android games is very difficult, because some games make money from ads and some publishers are going selling through alternative app stores or are self-publishing.

For instance I'm willing to bet that The Humble Bundle packs that were self-published were not added to this count ... http://www.humblebundle.com/ ... although the developers did make quite the revenue.

There's a simple reason why: Google Play's app selection sucks.

Look at "top free apps". It's not filled with useful, smart and new applications by a wide variety of developers. Instead you see Facebook, Google's services, and Flash Player. Then look at "top new free apps". You see very poor quality games from organisations like "Free games Play - Games Team".

Now look at iTunes's iOS App Store. There is far more quality and variety in the "Top Free Apps" section. And games you've actually heard of.

Edit: I'm not saying this to bash Android, I love the platform. But I am irritated by its app selection. It's probably why I have very few apps on my Android phone, but had far more on my iPod touch when I had it.

Dunno why you are looking for free apps when discussing profits. In Top Paid for Android, I see Angry Birds Space, Draw Something, Cut the Rope, Where's My Water, and Osmos HD in the top ten alone. All high quality. Of course, the real intriguing list is top grossing, which is dominated by Zygna style apps which are making out like casinos by running a kind of legalized gambling on both platforms. Basically using the nucleus accumbens like an ATM.

Ah, good point. I'm not sure why I'm looking at free apps.

But you're right, it's very interesting to look at top grossing. There are some non-Zynga-style apps there which just have huge sales volume. At least, I assume that.

At my old job, I worked with 12 people; 10 had Androids and 2 had iPhones. Both of us iPhone users had purchased at least 2 apps and only 1 of the Android users purchased 1 app.

If you're trying to generate revenue, going Android usually isn't the way to to do it. This is just my non-scientific random sampling though.

Yeah, that's a pretty small sample size :) I'll gladly pay up for a good game on my Android, and do so every month when I get bored of whatever I have been playing.

I get the feeling that lots of people with android phones buy them because they need them to do serious work and don't buy a lot of games. 99% of people I know with iPhones don't do anything serious with them and purchased them purely for the entertainment value.

The wonderfully ironic thing about this is that 10 years ago we would have said exactly the same thing about Mac v PC.

We still do.

The PC users are the silent majority now as they were 10 years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_cha...

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