THE SWRVE
NEW PLAYERS
REPORT
The Swrve New Players Report
2
INTRODUCTION
The mobile games business is driven by acquisition. Huge amounts of
time and money are spent on attracting new players every month. An
entire ecosystem has developed to help us find those players and deliver
installs.
But what happens then?
In this report, for the first time ever we lift the
lid on new players. We look at how long they
stay, and what they pay. It’s essential reading
for anyone in the mobile games space.
Enjoy!
Notes on Our Methodology
• The report covers data from the first
90 days (and only the first 90 days)
of life of freemium games players. In
order to provide that data, we took
new players from November 2013:
being defined as any player new to a
particular game in that month
• The report is restricted to freemium
games and examines only revenue
delivered from in-app purchases
• This data is aggregated from millions
of users across dozens of titles
• Using Swrve’s Fraud Filter
technology, only ‘genuine’ revenue
events are reported
• Whenever we quote ‘lifetime’ values,
these apply to this 90 day period.
Whilst clearly revenue occurs
beyond this window, our revenue
curve suggests that this amount is
minimal
The Swrve New Players Report
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HOW LONG DO NEW
PLAYERS STAY?
Most of us in the industry are
instinctively aware that many players
don’t necessarily stay in our games
for long. On the other hand, there are
loyal players who remain within titles
for periods of not months but years.
We can look at this question in two ways: by
date and by session. If we look at sessions
first, we see immediately that more than 19%
of new players played the game only once.
More than 19% of new
players played the
game only once
Number of Sessions Played In The First 90 Days
19.3%
ONE
SESSION
12.3%
TWO
SESSIONS
8.1%
THREE
SESSIONS
5.8%
FOUR
SESSIONS
54.5%
FIVE OR MORE
SESSIONS
That’s an astonishing number of users - presumably paid for - that never engage in any
meaningful way with the game. And there are further significant numbers that only engage on a
handful of occasions. A full 45% of new players - almost half of all acquisition - never had more
than 4 sessions within the game.
The Swrve New Players Report
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RETENTION BY DAY
It’s more traditional to look at how well
players are retained by looking at the
‘calendar day’ retention.
In this form of analysis, we simply look at how many players are active on Day 1, 7 and 30 after
first session - although do note our section on retention methodology for more detail on how
exactly these numbers are calculated. This chart shows the Day 1, 7 and 30 retention rates for
all new players in November.
New Player Retention on Days 1, 7, 30 (bucketed)
40%
33.9%
30%
20%
16.4%
10%
5.5%
0
As we can see - and as should come as no surprise - there is a steep fall off. By Day 30, a mere
5.5% are still playing the game (although it should be noted this reflects the number playing on
this exact day, not any other in the future).
Even on the very day after first session, only 34% are still playing.
The Swrve New Players Report
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What does this mean? Most importantly, these numbers relating to retention (and number of
sessions played) suggest that acquisition as a metric is in many cases close to worthless. As we
tend to spend a significant amount of money in this area, that is not a comforting thought.
In brief, game developers operating in the freemium model would do well to keep a careful eye
on how new players from specific acquisition sources are retained. If they do not - they may
well be wasting their money.
Calculating Retention
Many retention figures are simply calculated based on calendar days - with ‘Day 1’ retention being the
percentage of players active at any time during the calendar day after install.
Unfortunately, that creates issues around users whose first session starts just ahead of midnight - or
even worse, when due to time zone differences users simply playing a couple of first sessions either
side of 8 o’clock (for example) appear to be ‘retained’ into Day 1.
For this reason, Swrve calculates retention based on buckets of 24 hours from first session start. For a
player to be ‘Day 1 retained’, they must play at least one session in the period between 24 and 48 hours
from the first session start.
The Swrve New Players Report
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WHAT THEY SPEND
Keeping new players is one thing.
Getting them to spend is another.
Over the same 90 day period, we took
a close look at how many of these
players spent real money, when and
how much they spent, and how those
purchases were distributed over time.
To start with the headline, 2.2% of all new
players made at least one new purchase
over the course of their first 90 days of
activity.
Of those ‘payers’ the average total spend was
$20.62, which in turn consisted of an average
of 3.3 purchases at an average SKU value of
$6.15.
Those numbers in turn imply a total revenue
per install (which is ultimately the number to
be compared with acquisition costs) of $0.45.
That number may seem low, but we believe
it reflects the single best data in this area
published to date - following an actual cohort
of users rather than attempting to infer player
value from total revenue metrics.
Total revenue per
install is 45 cents
It is worth remembering that this figure does
not include revenue from advertising or paid
installs, and that when comparing this figure
with typical CPIs in the industry, the charthacking motive for the latter must be taken
into account.
The Swrve New Players Report
The chart below shows a breakdown of all new players by total number of purchases made in
the first 90 days of life, and shows that 40% of players only make a single purchase, whilst 6.2%
ultimately make 10 or more.
Percentage of Payers by Number of Purchases after 90 Days
7
The Swrve New Players Report
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WHEN THEY SPEND
The early days of life are absolutely
vital when it comes to ‘converting’
freemium players on mobile.
It is imperative to make every effort to put
the right experiences and offers in front of
players from the very moment they begin play
in order to maximize the revenue generated in
what can be a very short window.
The chart below shows the distribution, by
week, of revenue accruing from all players.
As can be seen, total revenue skews heavily
toward the early life of new players, with 53%
of all revenue accrued being in the first week
of life.
Percentage of Total 90 Day Revenue by Week of Lifecycle
The Swrve New Players Report
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Clearly additional revenue can and will be added beyond the 90th day - but we believe the
nature (and scale) of the ‘long tail’ is already relatively clear from this chart.
If we isolate that first week, and show by day, from days 1 to 7, the percent of total revenue (in
the 90 days) contributed, we see the following:
Percentage of Total 90 Day Revenue by Day of Life
So a full 36% of revenue is contributed within 3 days from first session start, and even 21% within
the first 24 hours.
This suggests that - as we have previously noted - the early days of life are absolutely vital when
it comes to ‘converting’ freemium players on mobile. It is imperative to make every effort to
put the right experiences and offers in front of players from the very moment they begin play in
order to maximize the revenue generated in what can be a very short window.
The Swrve New Players Report
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TIME TO FIRST
PURCHASE
With 90 days of data to analyze, it is
possible to take a closer look at how
long it takes those players to make a
first purchase.
The chart below shows the percentage, by week, of the total paying population who made their
first purchase in that week. Based on the revenue analysis above, it is no surprise to see this
skew towards early life, with a full 55% of purchasers making a first purchase in the first week of
life. The decline from there is steep. Less than 1% wait until week 13 to make that first purchase.
Percentage of Payers Making First Purchase by Week
The Swrve New Players Report
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If we again isolate the first week, and show by day, from days 1 to 7, the percent of payers making
their first purchase on that day, we see that more than 25% make a first purchase on day 1, and
nearly 15% on day 2.
Percentage of Payers Making First Purchase by Day
Based on those numbers, it is no surprise to find that average time to first purchase, even when
accounting for 90 days of data, is 62 hours and 54 minutes (of elapsed calendar time since first
session start).
The Swrve New Players Report
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WHO SPENDS MOST?
In our monetization report we found
that within a single calendar month,
only .15% of players contributed over
50% of revenues - based on 1.5% of
players monetizing in total.
When we perform the same analysis for new players only, but allowing for 90 days of activity,
we find that, as noted above, 2.2% make some purchase in that time frame. If we then rank all
payers by decile (as below) we can see that the top 10% of our new user population contribute
46.4% of revenue - a result surprisingly similar to our result in last month’s monetization report.
Effectively, in this analysis .22% of all new players in November contributed more than 46% of all
revenues accrued from all acquisition in total. Again - a cause for reflection for anyone involved
in freemium acquisition strategy.
Percentage of 90-Day Revenue by Payer Decile
The Swrve New Players Report
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ABOUT
SWRVE
Swrve is the world’s leader in driving
engagement, retention and revenue in
mobile apps and games.
The Swrve platform delivers everything
product and monetization managers need
to ensure their mobile apps succeed where it
counts.
We do this by building long-lasting, profitable
relationships with their users and driving the
bottom line as a result.
Swrve includes:
• A/B testing - to optimize user experience
and improve retention rates
• Targeted in-app campaigns - delivering
the right offers, to the right audience, at
the right time
• Push notifications - driving engagement
even when users are outside the app
• Real-time optimization - automated
campaigns reacting in real-time to user
behavior in the app
• All the analytics and segmentation you’ll
ever need
Swrve is trusted by some of the world’s largest and most successful mobile app businesses.
We handle billions of events a day and process data in real-time for multi-million DAU titles.
If you’d like to join them, drop us a line at [email protected]