Featured Blog | This community-written post highlights the best of what the game industry has to offer. Read more like it on the Game Developer Blogs.
I spent some time analysing how 32 games on the App Store sell their premium currency, and some interesting trends and tricks emerged.
Most free-to-play games on mobile sell some sort of premium currency: gems in Clash of Clans, donuts in Simpsons Tapped Out, gold in Game of War and so on. I spent some time analysing how 32 games on the App Store sell their premium currency, and some interesting trends and tricks emerged.
If you like the kind of stuff I write about, you can follow me on my blog allworkallplay.org or twitter @awapblog.
The Games
Before we proceed, meet my data set. The 32 games analyzed are:
8 Ball Pool, Angry Birds Go!, Boom Beach, CastleVille Legends, Clash of Clans, Clumsy Ninja, CSR Racing, Disco Zoo, Dungeon Keeper, Empire, Farm Heroes Saga, Game of War, Hay Day, Hobbit: KoM, Jelly Splash, Juice Cubes, Kingdoms at War, Kingdoms of Camelot, Knights & Dragons, Modern War, Monster World, Moshi Monsters Village, Papa Pear Saga, Pocket Village, Puzzle & Dragons, Real Racing, Royal Revolt 2, Samurai Siege, Simpsons Tapped Out, Smurf's Village, Subway Surfers, Top Eleven.
My method for selecting games was pretty unscientific... just a mix of games I had played, wanted to play, or were in the AppStore top grossing. Perhaps I'll expand on the list some day.
Fancy a deeper look? Click to download my full spreadsheet with all recorded data and graphs.
Trends & Tricks
1) There is not much variety in pricing
This diagram says it best:
A lot of games offer the same 5 price points: £2.99, £6.99, £13.99, £34.99, £69.99. Those are the 5 big bubbles you see in the diagram above.
(That's $4.99, $9.99, $19.99, $49.99, $99.99 for American readers).
The most popular thing to do is to offer those 5 price points exactly with no changes, as is done in Supercell's Boom Beach for example.
This exact price progression accounts for 1/5th of all games surveyed.
If you also count price progressions that are within 1 price of the most popular (meaning they can be reached by either adding, modifying or subtracting just 1 price from the progression), you've got over 3/5ths covered.
Extend it again to count price progressions within 2 prices and almost all games are accounted for.
Very few games deviate from this formula... Moshi Monsters Village and Empire are tied for the most unique price points award, with each offering 4 unique prices that no other game does. It's nice to see someone trying something a little different, it will be interesting to see if their pricing catches on.
2) Players agree on a minimum price, publishers don't
The only price that games seem to disagree on is the minimum to charge.
I wanted to know: is it worth offering a minimum price cheaper than £2.99? The App Store most popular purchase ranking reveals some interesting information.
1) In 100% of cases where £2.99 is the cheapest price, it is also the most popular purchase.
2) 17 games had both a starting price cheaper than £2.99, as well as a price point at £2.99.
3) For the majority (70%) of those 17 games, £2.99 was still the most popular price point.
The same information visualized:
It appears that even if you offer players a minimum price point cheaper than £2.99, chances are they will probably still prefer to buy the £2.99 option. But some questions remain...
a) When £2.99 is the cheapest option, how many sales are lost from players only willing to pay less than £2.99?
b) And how much revenue is gained from players that would have preferred a cheaper option but paid £2.99 anyways because there was no cheaper option?
c) And most importantly, which is greater? A or B?
Unfortunately I don't have enough data to answer it. But it did make me think back to a talk I watched long ago