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Just 1.9 percent of mobile players make a purchase, says new report

The volume of players in free-to-play mobile is simply staggering, but few of them make purchases -- we knew that, sure, but now we have some fresh numbers.

Mobile analytics and marketing firm Swrve has released a new report of mobile game in-app purchases during February 2016. The data once again confirms the low monetization rates of free-to-play mobile players: during the month, 1.9 percent of players made in-app purchases.

This data was culled from "tens of millions of users and their associated monetization events" over the course of the month. Although Swrve didn't provide information on what games were sampled, it works with partners like EA, Zynga, and Warner Bros.

The average value of an in-app purchase was $13.82 -- a pretty large number, which goes some way to explaining how value is driven in the F2P mobile market despite the low conversion. The report notes that while 64 percent of players only make one purchase, 56 percent of players who convert to payers go on to make a second purchase. 

Fewer purchases were made as compared to the last time Swrve sampled this data (in 2014) but the report suggests that developers may simply be packaging IAPs in more attractive ways (in other words, users only have to make one more valuable purchase to get what they want.)

The report notably excludes all revenue from other sources, such as advertising or premium titles, and focuses only on IAPs.

You can download it for free here; we've extracted an interesting chart breaking down purchase prices below.

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