The App Stores – Analysis

The two largest game market places are Google Android Marketplace and Apple’s App Store with 87,785 and 95,324 active games respectively each. Apple has around 77,000 publisher or developers providing games and has sold over 10 billion apps since its creation in 2008. These two market places make around $1.9 billion in combined revenues across the United States in 2011.

The game market place is split into a number of genre, which Apple App Store currently has 19. The table below shows the number of titles in each game genre.

From this table you will see that the competition in each genre is extremely variable, from Dice which have non of the top 20 titles and only 393 games, to Action which has 5,872 titles and 5 in the top 20. So correctly selecting your genre increases the opportunity to sell.

Most games are associated with at least two genre, e.g. Real Racing is both in Action and Racing. The major sales are within family, kids and action. So being able to used these major genres increases you chances to be within the featured list. 

The sale of the titles follows a traditional exponential curve with the average full time developer receiving $30,000 per year per title. However there is a considerable number of small one off game developers which provide no or limited marketing of their title.

 The smaller developers who only have one game, no or limited marketing experience on average get $500 per title. Those who are dedicating time for marketing, producing multiple titles receive on average $30,000 per title. The mean average yearly revenue for a title is $48,000 which requires publishing and also a targeted marketing plan which also develops the title over a period of 18 months. The largest game revenues are within the million of dollars and require a consistent product plan which ensure that markeitng can be developed through the numerous channels.

 If you found this interested or would like to contact us in promoting your title then please email contact@dojit.com.