Posted by Video Game News Staff, 109 days ago  |
In-App Purchases Powering Free-to-Play Game Model Says Parks Associates
The way games are delivered and paid for by gamers is changing, for the better. In 2008, 
according to Parks Associates, only 7% of U.S. gamer downloaded games or gaming apps to their mobile devices. That grew to 18% in 2011 partly due to better, stronger smartphones and tablets.
Among tablet owners, 71% of adults and 79% of teens play games on the device at least one hour per month says a new whitepaper from the research firm. 135 million people play at least one hour of games per month (compared to 56 million in 2008).
This growth of mobile gaming is expanding the revenue stream for Facebook games, where gamers already spend $29 per month, and free-to-play games, where gamers spend $21 per month to purchase virtual goods and upgrades.
This spells good news for gamers who are definitely supporting the games they play with purchasing. That means more companies will look into this business model and shy away from major price point one-time purchases, one can hope.
The Parks Associate research, Online Gaming and Digital Distribution, is a survey of U.S. gamers that quantifies their gaming and spending habits and determines their gaming
preferences and future intentions. They didn’t give the exact methodology which is poor form for anyone doing research so there’s no telling what the margin of error is or how many actual gamers they are tracking or surveying. We don’t even know if it was a survey or based on other data in fact.
Overall, they say, about 80% of U.S. gamers play either free-to-play online games or Facebook games.
Instead of ending support of customers after they buy individual game titles, game companies now focus on building gamer communities and developing ongoing relationships with their customers. The positive effect of this approach is that game monetization can be extended beyond the point of sale. Unlike traditional offline games, the online world allows the industry
to earn revenue even when people play the same game repeatedly.
Social games are mostly casual in nature and require little up-front development costs. However, since social games are ongoing services, expertise in providing Internet services
and customer care is essential to a company’s success. It is not uncommon for operational and service costs to account for 70-80% of a game’s total cost. Finding cost-effective infrastructures to accommodate huge customer bases of millions of players is critical.
For a long time people stated that PC gaming was dead. Meanwhile, GDN was expanding its PC department with a new Editor and now around 10 freelance contributors. Why? Look at this chart.
PC gaming of all sorts is very much alive and well. This included tablets presumably as computers since they are and there was no tablet-specific category.
|
