The mobile games industry is a fast-changing beast, and one way of tracking its trends is running a regular survey.

That's what Scientific Revenue is undertaking with its Mobile Game Monetization: IAP Best Practices survey.

It's announced the results from the first survey today, and will look to repeat the process on a quarterly basis.

What we learned

As for the key takeaways from survey #1, they are stark.

The market for pure paid mobile games has declined: less than 16% of developers in the survey now use this model.

Instead most developers are using in-game advertising (70%) and IAPs (90%) to monetize their games.

The sophistication of their IAP economies isn't high, however.

Almost 60% of developers don't offer different IAP to different users (something Scientific Revenue's tech enables), while only 22% vary their IAP pricing - typically special offer bundles - more regularly than on a monthly basis.

Of developers who do offer retailing discounts - as the graph above shows for weekend sales - the results speak for themselves, however.

Almost 60% report either 'good' or 'great' results.

International pricing

It's a similar situation when it comes to whether developers take advantage of the international pricing tiers than Apple and Google have rolled out.

• A third of developers have the same pricing for the US as China, India etc.
• But 31% do have local pricing for India, and
• 25% have local pricing for China.

What's clear then is the best developers are taking full advantage of technical innovation and F2P best practices: an example the majority of developers can learn from. 

You can read the full details of Scientific Revenue's Mobile Game Monetization: IAP Best Practices survey - which also looks at pricing tiers, IAPs to remove ads and other monetisation techniques - from the Scientific Revenue blog.