Category Archives: Analysis

Dec 18, 2012 / 11:39am

You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too – Maximize Ad Revenue and Maintain User Retention in Mobile Games

PlayHaven Data Insights:

  1. Developers can significantly increase mobile game revenue via ads without sacrificing user retention.
  2. Mobile game developers that allow ads for games of the same genre can increase ad revenue by up to 196%, without loss in retention.
  3. One PlayHaven partner increased net eCPMs on iPhone by 85% and iPad by 174% by allowing same genre ads, and maintained the same level of retention.
  4. Placing ads after users are engaged with a game can improve user retention by up to 57%.

So, you’ve built a great mobile game – in addition to in-app purchases, advertising revenue can make a significant contribution to your game monetization. But, in order to maximize potential ad revenue and keep players in your game, you must make informed decisions with regard to which games you advertise and when to display those ads.

Your goal in running in-game ads should be driving maximum revenue while maintaining retention among current users. We’ve taken an in-depth look at ad performance and retention between game genres to help our partners understand how to maximize their games’ advertising revenue while maintaining user retention.

Contrary to popular belief – ads for games within a similar genre do not cannibalize your user base
A common concern we hear from game developers is that by allowing similar games to advertise in their game, there is potential to lose users to competitors and consequently miss opportunities for in-game monetization via in-app purchases.

PlayHaven findings reveal that this is not the case and game developers can use ads for same genre games to generate revenue up to 196% more efficiently while seeing no loss in user retention compared to only running ads from games of different genres.

Ad Retention Graph 1

More after the jump »

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Aug 31, 2012 / 8:49pm

Girls in Gaming: Breaking the Stereotypes

I’ve never been a gamer.

I’ve played plenty of games, to be sure. I’ve even been completely obsessed with some games, to the point where every waking hour outside of work or school was spent playing them. But I’ve never felt like a gamer.

Part of the reason I’ve never felt like a gamer, even at the heights of my gaming, is because I never felt like I fit the image of a “typical” gamer. I’m not a socially awkward, sex-deprived teenage boy or fat old guy with questionable hygiene and diet consisting of Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets, I would think. I’m not a gamer. I just play games sometimes.

South Park's representation of a typical gamer

South Park’s representation of a typical gamer

At the time, I was probably in my mid-teens, and only slightly aware of how untrue this stereotype was. Anyone who identified as a gamer, in my teenage mind, fit into at least part of this stereotype and, since I didn’t, I couldn’t possibly be a gamer.

Of course, the thing about stereotypes is that they’re not exactly representative of an entire population. Sure, there are gamers who fit that description, but they’re the exception, not the rule. There are gamers with social lives that would make mine look like I’m a hermit, gamers in happy, healthy relationships, gamers with great hygiene, gamers who would never pick up a can of Mountain Dew, gamers who are neither a teenage boy nor a fat old guy.

And, of course, there are gamers who aren’t even male…

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) reports, in their 2012 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry (graphic below), that 47 percent of all players are female, and adult women comprise a greater portion of the gaming population than teenage boys (age 17 and under). This statistic gets ripped apart by some critics, though, who argue that the numbers are diluted because the survey takes into account casual gamers as well as hardcore gamers – people who play Angry Birds while riding the bus as well as people who dedicate hours to raids in World of Warcraft. Hardcore gamers, critics argue, are usually not female.

ESA Gamer Demographic Statistics: Gender

At least, not yet.

More after the jump »

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Jul 30, 2012 / 7:00am

When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.

“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished. “ – Benjamin Franklin

Recently, I found myself in the middle of a Six Degrees of Wikipedia spree (it started at skeuomorphism) where I had landed on a page about a mid-90s Windows shell called Packard Bell Navigator. A big part of my early computer life was sunk into PB Navigator’s Kidspace, a little digital nook on the family computer that looked something like this:

Back in the mid-90s, I thought this was the coolest thing ever. Who knows how much time I spent clicking around on this screen looking for “Easter eggs” (if you clicked on the little skull or squid up in the corner, for example, it made a funny noise) and rearranging my games on the shelves, not to mention actually playing those games (my favorites were Rodent’s Revenge and SkiFree).

Looking back on this interface now, nearly twenty years later (geez! Way to make myself feel old!), with my brand new job as PlayHaven’s Senior User Experience Designer, I’m kind of amazed at how much things have changed.

In the design world, change is constant. Even if a product or application seems “finished” to our consumers, chances are we’re behind the scenes, sworn to secrecy, getting the next big thing ready.

Most of the time, changes are incremental. We release small changes to introduce functionality, fix bugs or improve the experience, and keep the product running smoothly and efficiently. Little by little, the product evolves and grows, at a comfortable rate; the releases are frequent, but the changes are manageable, almost bite-sized.

Dramatic changes, however, happen much less frequently, and have a much bigger impact. More after the jump »

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May 24, 2012 / 9:00am

Spending your way to the top of the free charts is so 2011!

You want more users.  You need more users.  But how do you get the users you want?

15 Minutes of Fame

Game developers are under ever increasing pressure to find sources of consistently strong users at good prices.  As the mobile space is maturing game developers are getting more sophisticated with their user acquisition strategy.  Between Apple banning incentivization, updating the ranking algorithm (still not as good as Google’s of course) and cracking down on the bot farms, developers have refocused on quality rather than quantity.  This focus has shifted spend from burst campaigns to steady and targeted campaigns.
More after the jump »

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