
Mobile gaming is a tough business, as getting mobile games discovered by players is increasingly hard as thousands of games are released every month. So what is a game developer to do? To understand the current mobile game discovery landscape better, Applifier fielded a survey to 1800 mobile gamers in March 2013.
We found out that word-of-mouth is the #1 way of discovering and downloading games for mobile gamers, exceeding traditional methods like advertising and websites. When we asked what way was the most influential in the decision of downloading new games, the top three choices were all word-of-mouth related: reading user reviews, hearing from a friend/family member of the game, seeing a friend/family member play the game. Besides being really effective, word-of-mouth is also very cost-effective.
Sharers care!
Another thing our survey found out are the “Sharers”, a highly valuable player segment, which comprises about 1/5 of the game players. These Sharers are more likely to download more games, play socially and convert to paying users. They are extremely interested, twice as highly as the mainstream users, in all kinds of sharing features from achievements to screenshots and to broadcasting.
Sharers are more likely to discover new games: they are on average 50% more likely to discover new games through online word-of-mouth. What this means is that when Sharers discover a new game, they share and advertise it to other Sharers and eventually attract the mainstream gamers to the game, too. According to our survey, over 80% of Sharers watched online game videos in the last 7 days, and over 45% of them said that watching the video directly led them to download the game in question.
These results emphasize the importance of building social features in games to attract and retain Sharers, and that the group of Sharers is indeed a highly valuable for game developers.
To find more about our survey and the results, please see the whitepaper in full.
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