There are a lot of fart, business, video game, cooking, and miscellaneous apps on the App Store, but who rules the roost on the Top (paid) Downloads charts? In a not-so-surprising finding by mobile application analytics company Distimo, it’s video games. In its latest report, Distimo reveals that 72 percent of downloads of the top 300 most popular premium applications are video games, leaving a mere 28 percent to stuff like business, writing, education, and other applications. And here’s a surprising thing: even though the selling price of mobile games continues to plummet (down 28 percent from last year in the US), revenue from top free-to-play titles has increased “tenfold” over the App Store in the US.
This latter finding jives with the findings in our last Flurry Analytics column, which covered free-to-play pretty extensively. According to Flurry, the average consumer spends around $14 per transaction on iOS and Android, which is a lot more dough than they would have parted with if a title was a premium, $1 download.
Flurry also pointed out that 30 percent of top tier $20 transactions are over $50, which is, uh, a lot of cash to spend on games like Tiny Tower [Free], but hey, it’s always the consumer’s choice.
Back to Distimo for a few moments: the analytics company also found that ten un-named publishers “account for more than half of all downloads” among the 300 most popular paid games on the App Store. Also, revenue in general on the App Store has increased 79 percent year-on-year, mostly because of the free-to-play explosion, one has to assume after gazing through the rest of the bulleted points regarding the dominance of the model.
If you dig numbers, you can download Distimo’s latest report. It has more charts and more words than we’ve shared with you today, and it’s a pretty cool (and digestible) read if you’re into App Store analytics. Also, I should note that free-to-play, whether you love it or hate it, is definitely the model of the moment on the App Store. I wonder what kinds of numbers we’ll see in six months.
