Just as developers massively expanded their audience by moving to free-to-play games, so with tools companies.

San Francisco-based PlayHaven opened up access for its suite of user engagement, retention and monetisation tools in March, and the impact has been notable.

Already growing quickly, the company says that thanks to boosted developer adoption, it added 109 million new users in the first three months of 2013.

Currently, it claims it tracks more than 523 million unique users - up 400 percent year-on-year - and a total that's increasing by 14 each second.

If you want some more big numbers, PlayHaven's self-styled lifetime value maximisation platform now has 121 million monthly active users and hosts 10 billion events monthly.

Boom time

"With thousands of new games launching every week, retaining and keeping players engaged has never been more important for game developers," stated PlayHaven COO said Charles Yim.

"Developers should use PlayHaven's tools to better engage their users, stay competitive in this market and make a meaningful impact on their games' performance."

One company doing just that is Mobile Deluxe. It's been using PlayHaven to better segment its players, promote virtual goods and run interstitial adverts.

"We make free-to-play casual games, so it's vital to capture revenue at all phases of a player's life cycle," said director of marketing Alfred Fung.

"Using a combination of PlayHaven's tools has allowed us to test and gain insight into what resonates with our audience in order to maximise revenue from different customer segments."