A quick look at spending tiers in free-to-play mobile games.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been building a set of planning tools for mobile free-to-play games, and I’m now at a point where I can share some early results.
One of my goals with these models is simple: help teams understand the spend depth* they actually need to support a viable business. It’s not enough to say “it should be large” (or infinite). Designers need a concrete sense of who they’re designing for, and how those players behave when they decide to spend.
Conventional wisdom says payers broadly fall into three groups:
- Low spenders (minnows): roughly 50% of payers, spending up to $10
- Medium spenders (dolphins): roughly 40% of payers, spending $10–$100
- High spenders (whales): the remaining 10%, spending $100+
The question is: how much are whales actually spending?
In many cases, it’s not hundreds. It’s thousands.
Using the cohort split above alongside publicly available AppMagic data, I ran the numbers on three successful games:
- Kick the Buddy (a fairly simple hypercasual game): whales spend roughly in line with other cohorts, because there are limited opportunities to purchase.
- Marvel Snap: whales spend an average of $913. Which implies the top spenders are significantly higher than that.
- Cookie Run: Kingdom: whales spend an average of $1,297. Again: average, not maximum.
To put that into perspective: in Cookie Run: Kingdom, whales generate over 84% of total revenue. Without sufficient spend depth, that game simply wouldn’t be commercially viable.
I’ve included a screenshot of the analysis, and there’s also a PDF version here.
Next step: I’m ready to start testing the full model with a few select studios. If you know anyone who might be interested in trying it please do send them my way.
References
- Whales, minnows, dolphins on GamesBrief.
- AppMagic for metrics.
- Spend depth in mobile games according to SuperScale.
* ‘Spend depth’: the maximum it should be possible for a player to spend in a given game.
