Juniper Research Publishes a New Report on In-Game Purchase Revenues
By Raju Shanbhag, TMCnet Contributor
Juniper Research (News - Alert) has published a new report wherein the company states that an increasing number of users are making in-game purchases which has resulted from a sharp rise in smartphone adoption.
The key findings from the report include: mobile game revenues on feature phones will halve over the next five years; mobile game downloads on tablets will increase dramatically, accounting for over a third of mobile game revenues by 2016; and social and casual games will account for the lion's share of mobile game downloads. The Mobile Games whitepaper is available to download from the Juniper website.
According to report author Charlotte Miller, "An increasing number of games developers are finding the in-game purchase model attractive simply because it provides easy answers. Their piracy rate will drop and the game will see more downloads. However, while some games may generate significant revenues from in-game items, the model doesn't work with all games and developers have to tread a fine line between encouraging purchases and appearing to be exploitative.”
The proportion of gamers who purchase these items will increase as users became accustomed to the freemium model, particularly purchasing in-game items, the report states. This will be most apparent in the social and casual genre in which users are increasingly expecting entertaining and immersive gameplay from free or low cost games. Another driver for this increase is the growth in the number of game developers adopting the freemium model rather than the pay-per-download model, the company stated in a press release.
Last year, Juniper published another report which stated that mobile cloud-based enterprise services, including unified communications, are forecasted to create $39 billion in annual revenues by 2016. The report goes on to say that this new trend offers service providers the ability “to develop double-sided revenues by opening their application programming interfaces to software as a service providers and thus share in revenues derived from their services.”
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Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Rich Steeves
