A new report published by Midia Research has provided a more nuanced picture of the mobile apps market. The results of the report heavily favor gaming, as they indicate that 84.9 percent of the 700 top grossing apps for iOS and Android machines are video games. Social networking, dating, and travel apps were the distant second, third, and fourth-place finishers. The researched markets were the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.
The authors of the study, Mark Mulligan and Karol Severin, said, "The impact of games is doubly strong because no other genre of apps has learned how to make in-app payments work as effectively as games companies have. The app economy is, for now at least, a games economy."
They also noted that because these apps are so lucrative, the publishers of the apps are able to pay for more advertising and marketing to keep the apps atop the sales charts. As an example, they discussed how the Finnish company Supercell—who developed Clash of Clans—can spend $1M per day on advertising their product because they rake in $5M per day in revenue. Essentially, the model has become self-sustaining.
If you're wondering why so many games are following the free-to-play model, then these results should be particularly illuminating. Developers are piling stacks by forcing players to spend dollars in increments. As The Guardian points out, Supercell made $892M in revenue in 2013, even though they only had two mobile apps on the market. That's a mind-boggling sum of money for a company that produces so little.
What do you think of these findings? Are you disgusted by how much money these companies are able to make from freemium games or are you wondering how you can get in on the action?
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[via The Guardian]
