In-appPurchase
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Rock Band Reloaded out now on App Store, Puzzle Quest 2 out soon
Two big sequels have hit the App Store in the past day or so -- as the holidays are here, more big name titles will be forthcoming for sure. First up, EA has released Rock Band Reloaded, a new version of the popular Rock Band music game series for iOS. This one plays generally the same as the first game as you have to tap certain notes on the screen as they slide down the board, but there are quite a few new options, including new songs (15 now, more free tracks coming soon, and more available via in-app purchase) and a new vocal mode that allows you to sing into the iPhone's microphone. The game is also updated for Retina Display, and it has awards and achievements to earn, though strangely, EA hasn't embraced Game Center quite yet. The iPhone version is $4.99, and the iPad HD version is $9.99. And Namco should have Puzzle Quest 2 on the App Store, though at the moment I can't find it out there. The puzzler/RPG title is terrific (I really enjoyed it on Xbox Live Arcade), and it looks like Namco has decided to go with a full release for $9.99 rather than going episodic as they did with the first title. Either way, the game is great -- hopefully it'll be back out on the App Store soon.
OpenFeint announces in-app content service, infrastructure to support freemium games
Social gaming network OpenFeint has finally unveiled its OpenFeint X service, which will allow developers on the App Store (and a few other mobile platforms) to add cloud-based microtransaction content to their games on top of Apple's own in-app purchase service. This is apparently a system that lives outside of Apple's own store, and allows developers to quickly and easily add in-app content without having to go through Apple's approval system. If that sounds confusing, it's because the system is still so new -- only a few developers have worked with it so far (though we're supposed to see it running in popular titles like Fruit Ninja soon), and the updates for providing virtual currency and goods aren't out yet. But this is the next step for OpenFeint -- after Apple released Game Center, OpenFeint's plan was to provide even more services on top of the Game Center functionality, and with the rise of freemium apps on the store lately, delivering this content is an important thing for developers to do. To kick off the new service, OpenFeint is holding what its calling a "million dollar challenge" -- the first 100 developers to sign up and use OpenFeint X will be able to earn up to $10,000 without sharing any revenue (which basically means OpenFeint is giving away $1 million of the money it would have made). After that, developers who use the service will enter a revenue sharing plan -- if you're a developer, you can find more details about that on the official website. This won't change things for most end users -- it likely won't matter to you whether you click one of Apple's buttons to make an in-app purchase or use code from another company. But it will be an interesting choice for developers to make. And given what we've heard about the growing revenues from in-app purchases, a service like this is showing up at exactly the right time.
Report: In-app purchases to overtake download revenues by 2013
Here's an interesting report from Juniper Research. According to their work, mobile app revenues will reportedly grow from the current US $6 billion to a whopping $11 billion by 2015. And the majority of that revenue will come not from the standard download fee, but instead from in-app purchases, according to Juniper. The firm claims that in-app purchase revenue will top one-off download fees by 2013. That seems hard to believe, given my current anecdotal usage, but there's no question that in-app purchases are growing by leaps and bounds as a form of sizable revenue for app developers. Jupiter's report also says that the biggest problem facing mobile app growth is just plain discovery -- with so many apps out there, it's hard for users to find new apps that they like, so what you tend to see is clumps of apps getting popular rather than users going out and finding their own favorites. Services like OpenFeint and Game Center have certainly helped to share information about new apps, and of course sites like ours try to spotlight as many apps as we can. But with a store full of hundreds of thousands of apps in it, it's tough to let more than a few hundred really shine. Maybe as we move forward, developers and Apple will come up with better solutions to help do that.
Flurry: In-app purchases generating lots more revenue per user
Analytics firm Flurry has announced that in-app purchases are generating $14.66 per user per year in June of 2010, which is a few times larger than it has been in the past. Previously to 2010, the games tracked were generating only a few bucks per user per year, but in January the total jumped to around $9, and it's now in the double digits. Flurry says that money doesn't include ad revenue -- it's strictly profit from in-app purchases, either unlocking features or selling virtual goods. Whenever you talk about making money on free games, you have to talk about Ngmoco -- that company famously choose "freemium" as its business plan, and business appears to be good. Exec Simon Jeffery confirmed exactly that at a conference earlier this week -- while he can't discuss actual revenue, he says things are going well. And of course other companies who already know how to make money from free games (like Zynga, whose Farmville recently released on the iPhone) will see this as a big green light for joining Apple's platform. The revenue per user isn't the only important stat here -- Apple also has plenty of users to offer up. Disney's free Toy Story 3 app released recently, and has already picked up 1.7 million users, a good number of which probably bought the 99 cent in-app game offered up. Lots and lots of users spending a surprising amount of money inside their apps means lots and lots of revenue for both iPhone developers and Apple.
