1）NPD最新调查报告显示，多数智能手机及平板电脑游戏玩家认为，价值3美元的移动游戏性价比较高，因此3美元可能就是此类付费游戏的最佳价格点。

NPD分析师Liam Callahan认为，多数手机游戏玩家已经习惯免费玩游戏，因此付费游戏很有必要找到最佳定价点以便保证收益。

US_Dollar(from purefx.co.uk)

报告还发现，这类玩家中仅有30%左右受访者愿意购买IAP内容，或者购买游戏应用的付费版本。

这类玩家平均每天在智能手机或平板电脑上投入的游戏时间占比59%，23%用户只在移动设备上玩游戏。比起智能手机游戏玩家，平板电脑用户为游戏付费的比例更高。

NPD发现今年将近半数玩家在智能手机、平板电脑上玩游戏的频率高于去年，这一点主要应归功于免费应用的盛行，以及移动游戏的便捷性。

2）据gamasutra报道，Spacetime Studios首席执行官Gary Gattis最近表示，开发移动平台的MMO游戏难度并不亚于PC或主机平台的同类产品。这些游戏都需要紧凑的后端技术，强大的运营模式以及持续更新。而如果这些环节的问题都解决了，也能够获得可观回报。

pocket legends(from infobarrel.com)

据其所称，这些移动MMO游戏玩家每天登陆5次左右，每日游戏时长达3小时。

该公司旗下已有3款MMO游戏（游戏邦注：包括《口袋传奇》、《Dark Legends》以及《Star Legends》），它们在iOS、Android以及浏览器（通过Chrome Web Store渠道）平台运营，并即将发布第4款游戏《Arcane Legends》。

3）据mobile-ent报道，玩具公司Spin Master日前推出一款基于热门手机游戏《Temple Run》（至今下载量已超过1亿次）的桌面游戏以及一款卡牌游戏。

Temple Run Danger Chase(from blog.games.com)

在名为Temple Run Speed Sprint的卡牌游戏中，玩家需遵根据游戏规则发牌，如果无法迅速采取行动，就会被猴子所超越。而在Templ Run Danger Chase的桌面游戏中，玩家需掷骰子争分夺秒地在“无尽”的游戏面板上逃亡。

4）据insidemobileapps报道，手机游戏开发商PerBlue日前宣布地理定位社交游戏《Parallel Kingdom》在移动平台每月收益最高可超过20万美元，尽管该游戏并未跻身iOS或Android热销游戏榜单前100名。

PerBlue成立已有三年，目前年收入超过300万美元；最初是通过向亲友筹资7.2万美元才最终发布了《Parallel Kingdom》。

users(from PerBlue)

这款游戏自发布以来就一直保持盈利性，在iOS和Android平台已有5万MAU和1.5万DAU，平均每天每DAU收益为0.4-0.5美元，其每月收益介于18万（基于0.4美元的日常平均DAU收益）至23万2500美元（基于0.5美元的日常平均DAU收益）。

该游戏有近85%收益来自Android用户，iOS用户收益占比仅15%（GameDuell公司曾在7月份称其iOS用户盈利性比Android用户高3倍，King.com则在最近称《Bubble Witch Saga》在iOS平台盈利性比在Facebook高3倍）。

据AppData数据显示，《Parallel Kingdom》最近位居Android休闲游戏榜单第281名，上周曾短暂跻身前200名。而在过去数月中，该游戏一直徘徊于第440名左右，

conversion funnel(from PerBlue)

该公司还透露，这款游戏的新玩家平均终身价值为3.25美元，用户转化率为15%，这些玩家至少连续玩四天后就会投入该游戏中。平均每名转化用户的终身价值为21.75美元；付费用户转化率为22%，这些付费用户的终身价值高达95美元。

5）据pocketgamer报道，Spacetime Studios首席执行官Gary Gattis在日前的GDC Online大会上发言指出，创办一家公司好比是经营一个婚姻，你得花许多时间同合作伙伴打交道。

他还强调了财务以及法务人员的重要性，Spacetime最先招聘的就是财务人员，并在早期投入了大量法务费用。他称公司创始人最好聘请律师拟定他们之间的协议以及偿付条款，Spacetime现在每月仍需支出5000美元的律师费用，共有4名待命律师为其提供服务。

6）Interactive Advertising Bureau最近数据显示，2012上半年互联网广告收益增长14%，创造了170亿美元的新记录。而移动广告收益为12亿美元，增长率则高达95%。

ads(from venturebeat)

数字视频广告收益超过10亿美元，增幅为18%；搜索广告收益为81亿美元，增长19%；展示广告收闪为56亿美元，增幅仅为4%。

值得注意的是，基于投放效能的广告（例如按点击付费广告）收益在2011年占比为64%，2012年则占比67%。基于印象的广告（例如按每千人印象付费的条幅广告）收益占比仍是31%左右，其他混合广告类型收益占比仅为2%。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）What’s the sweet spot for mobile game purchases?

By Eric Caoili

For consumers who play most of their games on smartphones or tablets, $3 is the optimal price when charging for a mobile game or a premium upgrade on a free title, according to a new study.

That’s according to survey results in The NPD Group’s latest report, Mobile Gaming 2012. The analyst firm found that “app gamers,” or people who play games primarily on smartphones or tablets, on average believe they will receive a good value for a mobile game at around $3.

“Many mobile gaming consumers have grown accustomed to gaming for free, making it essential to find the sweet spot for pricing that encourages purchasing by as many consumers as possible,” says NPD analyst Liam Callahan.

There’s plenty of room for mobile developers and publishers to increase their conversions of non-paying players to paid users, as the report found that only about 30 percent of app gamers are willing to make in-app purchases or pay for premium versions of their free-to-play apps.

The group also notes that app gamers on average spend 59 percent of their total game time on smartphones or tablets, and nearly a quarter only play on mobile devices. Those who favor playing games on tablets are more likely to purchase or upgrade games than those who prefer to play on smartphones.

Looking at changes in the sector over the last year, NPD found that almost half of all gamers are playing smartphone and tablet titles more in 2012 than they did in 2011, mostly due to the availability of free apps and the convenience of mobile games. （source：gamasutra）

2）MMO players on mobile can be just as loyal as on PC

By Staff

“They log in about five times a day for about three hours, and give us about $115 a quarter.”

- Spacetime Studios’ CEO Gary Gattis on the loyalty of his mobile MMO players.

The challenges of developing a mobile MMO are no different than of developing for PC or console. The games require intense backend technology, a great business model, and constant updating.

Still, if all of the pieces of the puzzle are in place, the rewards can be stellar.

Gattis’ comments come alongside those from Shadow Cities developer Grey Matter and Order & Chaos Online developer Gameloft in a new Gamasutra feature on the topic of mobile MMO development.

Spacetime Studios has three MMOs — the fantasy-themed Pocket Legends, horror Dark Legends, and sci-fi Star Legends — which are available for iOS, Android, and browser via Chrome Web Store.

Gattis says that his players are so loyal that they “would plug their phones into their computers to maintain a charge, and play for hours and hours on end.”

These loyal players “have stayed with us since the beginning, and they’re not outliers, they’re a significant portion of our player base.”

On the success of its first three titles, Gattis’ studio is developing a fourth, Arcane Legends, due to ship soon.（source：gamasutra）

3）Temple Run goes offline

by Mike Shaw

Toy company releases board game and card game based on hit mobile app

Toy company Spin Master has launched a board game and a card game based on the hit iPhone and Android app Temple Run.

To date, the game has been downloaded more 100 million times.

In the Temple Run Speed Sprint card game, players must follow the Idol’s commands to play out action cards in the correct way. But if they don’t hit the button quick enough, the monkeys will screech and slow them down. The player who gets ride of his or her cards first, wins.

In the Temple Run Danger Chase board game, players roll the dice and race against the clock to move across the ‘infinite’ game board to escape.

Almost one third of kids who’ve played Temple Run said they’d want a Temple Run toy or game.

The move follows other mobile brands like Angry Birds that have reached out into the real world.（source：mobile-ent）

4）Parallel Kingdoms generating up to $0.50 a day per DAU, mostly on Android

Mike Thompson

Mobile developer PerBlue’s flagship location-based social game Parallel Kingdom is generating over $200,000 a month on mobile devices, even though it isn’t in the top 100 grossing games categories on either iOS or Android.

This figure comes to us from CEO Justin Beck’s GDC Online talk “Bootstrapping 101: How College Kids Built a Thriving Game Company in Under Three Years,” where he was detailed his company’s history since it was founded three years ago. The developer now grosses over $3 million a year. A good portion of this talk dealt with how the company’s early founders decided to stay in Madison, WI, due to the low cost of living and the pool of recruitable talent that comes out of the University of Wisconsin. Beck also explained how the company decided to raise its initial funding to launch Parallel Kingdom from family and friends, raising $72,000 in exchange for a small percentage of the company.

Since the game’s launch, Per Blue’s managed to be profitable. Beck showed the below infographic to the audience, breaking down Parallel Kingdom’s monetization. Between iOS and Android, the game has 50,000 monthly active users and 15,000 daily active users. According to Beck, the game generates $0.40 to $0.50 per day per DAU. Based on these numbers, Parallel Kingdom is generating somewhere between $180,000 ($0.40 over 30 days) to $232,500 ($0.50 over 31 days) a month.

Approximately 85 percent of the game’s revenue comes from Android users while only 15 percent comes from iOS. This is a stark contrast to what we normally hear from mobile developers. Case in point: GameDuell told us in July that iOS users monetize up to four times better than Android users and King.com told us yesterday Bubble Witch Saga monetizes three times better on iOS than it does on Facebook.

Our AppData traffic-tracking service doesn’t show Parallel Kingdom in any of the top iOS lists, but the game is currently the No. 281 casual game on Android after a brief spike into the top 200 rankings last week. Before that, Parallel Kingdom sat around the No. 440 mark for the past few months. This means that even though Parallel Kingdom isn’t normally in the top 200 games on Android, it’s bringing in somewhere between $153,000 and $197,625 a month.

Beck didn’t  discuss the figures for PerBlue’s two newer games, Parallel Mafia and Parallel Zombies. However, the aforementioned figures mean Parallel Kingdom is at most currently generating $2,790,000 a year, which means there’s some these other games are generating at least a total of $210,000 a year ($17,500 a month) between them.

One other monetization detail was revealed during the talk. In Parallel Kingdom, new player have a lifetime value of $3.25 per user. About 15 percent of the game’s players become “Converted Users,” meaning they play for at least four days in a row and become invested in the game. The average converted user has a LTV of $21.75. Finally, 22 percent of that 15 percent undergo a “paying conversion,” but these payers have a LTV of $95.00 per user.

Towards the end of his speech, Beck noted many developers might shy away from developing games for niche audiences because they believe the audience wouldn’t be large enough to survive on but “niche products have more legs than you think.”（source：insidesocialgames）

5）GDC Online 12: Spacetime’s Gattis on why start ups needs lawyers and finance guys first

by Jon Jordan

Kicking off the final day of GDC Online 2012, Gary Gattis, CEO of local studio Spacetime Studios gave a talk on ‘How to Build a Company to Weather Any Storm’.

The company has had a rise, fall, rise-type history.

It started off developing a $30 million outer space third person, vehicle combat anime-styled MMOG for NCsoft, called BlackStar, which was eventually cancelled.

“It was soul crushing experience, but you have to accept it and move on,” Gattis said. “We didn’t do that.”

Instead, Spacetime spend a year looking for another publisher, burning through $1.5 million in the process.

Strong foundation

However, because the company had been spent up properly, Spacetime was able – eventually – to transition to mobile MMOG development.

“Starting a company is very much like a marriage. You will be spending a lot of time with your partners,” Gattis pointed out.

He also stressed the importance of strong foundations. Spacetime’s first hire was a finance guy, and it spend money early on legal fees.

“You need to hire a lawyer in terms of founders’ agreement and payback clauses when you’re starting up a company,” Gattis said.

“Even now we allocate $5,000 a month to miscellaneous laywer stuff.”

Indeed, Spacetime has always ensured it had strong termination clauses in its contracts, including forcing the publishers to pay future milestones so the studio could sensibly downsize.

Gattis said not only has this kept the company alive through two big project cancellations, and some of its staff have come back to work with Spacetime multiple times despite being laid off because it scales down properly.

The company now has four lawyers on call.

Open to all

The big shift for the company came when it scaled right down to six people and went unpaid for six months to make its first mobile game Pocket Legends in 2010.

As one for the first mobile MMOGs, it caught the eye of Apple, who asked Spacetime to hold the release until iPad came out, which of course it did.

The next stage of the company’s development was taking on financing from Insight Venture Partners so it could scale up. It’s since released two more mobile MMOG with another one about to be released.

Today, Spacetime is 42 people strong and it works hard to keep everyone in the loop of what’s going on.

“I encourage you to have extreme information flow. Our employees see our revenue statements,” Gattis proposed.

He said the only issue he’d experienced with this was that staff might leave if they could see the company was on the slide, but that he thought the advantages far outweighed any issues. （source：pocketgamer）

6）Internet ad revenue hits $17B, mobile ad revenues double in first half of 2012

John Koetsier

There’s good news for people who like free content and services online. And even better news for web publishers, search engines, and social sites who want to provide that content and services.

Internet ad revenues are up 14 percent in the first six months of 2012, hitting a new record $17 billion. And that 14 percent increase is dwarfed by mobile’s nearly doubling — a 95 percent increase — to hit $1.2 billion.

In addition, digital video ad revenue grew by 18 percent to just over $1 billion while search revenues for the first quarter were up 19 percent to $8.1 billion, and display ad revenue was up just four percent to $5.6 billion.

Those numbers were released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an advertising industry organization which has recently come under fire for opposing “do not track” technology that allows consumers to opt out of online tracking.

The growth in mobile is particularly interesting.

While certainly increasing from a smaller base, the near-doubling shows that mobile site and app revenue models depending on advertising are just starting to hit their stride. According to IAB numbers, the first few years of digital advertising from 1996 to 2000 showed triple-digit increases ranging from 110 percent to 320 percent annually, and if the pattern continues, mobile ad revenue has a long runway for growth.

Another interesting set of numbers focus on the type of publisher revenue model. Performance-based advertising, such as pay-per-click, has grown from 64 percent of advertising revenue in 2011 to 67 percent in 2012. Impression-based advertising, such as banners ads which are paid on a per-thousand-impressions basis, remained steady at 31 percent, while hybrid models decreased to only two percent.

“Solid double-digit growth in a stagnating economy is a significant accomplishment,” Sherrill Mane, and IAB vice-president, said in a statement. “There is evidence that CPMs are maintaining, and even increasing, further substantiating the vitality of the internet ad market.”

That’s good news for internet publishers — yes, that includes VentureBeat — and it’s good news for consumers who want free content and services.（source：venturebeat）