​​The Many Faces of Mobile Gaming Monetization

Mobile gaming has become a popular form of entertainment globally, with billions of people spending time immersed in virtual worlds. However, the rise of “pay to play” and “pay to win” models driven by the use of microtransactions has led to concerns about the potential financial burden placed on heavy users of these mobile games.

This concern hasn’t been helped by the lack of transparency about in-app purchases in games or what spending looks like in games.

In our work, we analyzed spending across nearly 3000 mobile games, focused on two areas: the distribution of in-game spending in mobile games and an analysis of the top one percent of spenders across a variety of genres.

We found that for some mobile games, a small percentage of its paying players generate a large percentage of its revenues. However, this was not consistent across the board as other games showed a more even distribution.

However, the most telling results came in the second area of study. While it’s logical that you would expect the top spenders to generate the most revenue for a mobile game, for some games the spending disparity between the top spenders and the rest of the players is quite large. In fact, we found 38 percent of the overall revenue is generated from just one percent of the players.

The study found that specific types of games are typified by higher spending, with simulated gambling products (“social casinos”) at the top. Additionally, there is a small subset of games across all genres, clusters, and age ratings in which the top 1 percent of players are highly financially involved, spending an average of $66,285 each in the 624 days under evaluation in the most extreme case.

This work has serious implications for the ongoing debate about video game monetization, which has captured the interest of policy makers and the media worldwide.