Study: 5% of Mobile Gamers Willing To Spend $50+

derGoldstein tips a story at AllThingsD about a study into mobile gamers' spending habits: "[The study] provides a fairly compelling argument as to why a developer should continue to give away his or her games for free ... After evaluating the spending habits of 3.5 million consumers across both iOS and Android, Flurry found that among those who pay for in-app transactions, greater than five percent will spend more than $50, which rivals the amount paid at retail for top console and PC games."

Comments

This means

[Dunbal]

95% are NOT willing to spend $50.

Re:This means

[hairyfeet]

Yes but in BOTH cases you are cutting out 95% of your potential audience by being a greedy twat! Look at how when Valve sold L4D for $2 they made more profit than the entire release had made up to that point simply because EVERYBODY bought it. With digital distribution bringing unit costs to zero one can sell at an impulse buy price and rake in mountains of cash, simply by not being greedy twats.

Hell I'll give an example from my own experience: I bought Kane & Lynch II. Why would I do that when one reviewer said "It sucks so much dicks it breathes spunk instead of air"? I bought it because it was $4 and at that price I figured I could easily get more than my money's worth if no other way than laughing at it like a bad movie. And you know what? I didn't feel ripped off, in fact I thought it was worth the money and got my $4 out of it in MP and once I put in the hack that got rid of the stupid censoring of nudity and headshots I felt I got my $4 out of SP too.

If you set the price low enough you can make mountains of cash but the sheer greed of the industry, their "Lets see how much we can bleed these fuckers for!" attitude is frankly cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. Digital distribution opens up a whole new world of profit to game publishers which allows them to have infinite copies for zero added cost. If more would stop being greedy twats and put games at impulse prices, I would say $20 or less for a start and below $10 after 6 months, then frankly they would see their profits skyrocket just as Valve did on L4D as the games would be so popular practically everyone would have it. This not only makes you mountains of money on the game itself but gives you an audience for sequels and other properties which you can make even more mountains of cash off of.

But instead they'll charge $50+ for the game, nickel and dime the living shit out of the player by wanting another $30-$40 to get all the DLC, most of which was ripped from the game, and then when the games sells a pittance compared to projections they'll blame it all on "piracy" instead of accepting the fact that trying to assrape your customers in a dead economy isn't a sound business plan.

Re:In-Game Purchases

[BasilBrush]

In game purchases indeed.The "Study" is done by Flurry, an analytics company that market a system for in game currency.

In other news, McDonalds say that 90% of customers are willing to finish off their burger meal with a desert.

5% of gamers maybe. But not even for 5% of games

[Opportunist]

Let's be honest here: 99.9something percent of the mobile games are nothing but more or less creative implementation of various flash games available from various flash game sites, mixed with cheap knockoffs and "kinda-sorta-like" versions of well known PC and console games.

50 bucks for that? Dream on!

I honestly wonder if those 5 percent think that 50 bucks would be a sensible price for Angry Birds and ... hell, whatever flavor of tower defense is the game of the month.