News

Revenue from freemium is 65% of the US top grossing games chart says Flurry's Jeferson Valadares

It's now the dominant model

Revenue from freemium is 65% of the US top grossing games chart says Flurry's Jeferson Valadares
Himself a convert from paid mobile games to freemium when he moved from EA Mobile to Playfish, Jeferson Valadares is Flurry's new GM Games, and he's out to preach the new gospel.

Writing his first post on Flurry's blog, Valadares has compared the breakdown of game revenue from the top 100 of the US top grossing chart in January 2011 with that from June 2011. Obviously, the data comes direct from Flurry's analytics which are used in around 90,000 apps.

Bait and switch

Back in January, the breakdown between revenue from premium games and freemium games was 61 percent to 39 percent respectively; that's now switched to 35 percent and 65 percent.

"When you make your game free and add in-app purchases, two powerful things can happen: first, more people will likely try your game since you've made the "ante" zero; and second, you will likely take more total money, since different players can now spend different amounts depending on their engagement and preferences," Valadares points out.

[source: Flurry blog]
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.