1）Distimo最近报告显示，《无尽之剑2》在苹果App Store庆祝5周年的限免活动中的单周收益仍然比促销之前高2.4倍（游戏邦注：该游戏原售价6.99美元，在苹果限免活动中收获570万下载量）。

Distimo指出，这一现象表明应用推出免费下载服务，通过IAP创收仍能产生更高的总收益。

但Chair Entertainment发言人Laura Mustard对此却表示，限免促销活动总会令游戏下载量增长，但他们并不认为这一结果很惊人，因为这款游戏在无需任何IAP的情况下也能实现良好的平衡性。

infinity_blade 2（from leiphone.com)

2）Flurry最新报告指出，在2011年，80%的应用采用免费模式，现在免费应用比例已经高达90%，付费应用比例已经缩减至10%。

free apps trend(from Flurry)

报告还显示，Google Play应用平均售价为0.06美元，iPhone则是0.19美元，iPad则是0.5美元。iPad应用平均售价几乎是Android应用的9倍，是iPhone的2.5倍。尽管iPad用户与iPhone用户存在一些重叠，但总体来看iPad用户消费能力仍然高于iPhone和Android用户。

Average app price(from Flurry)

3）据mobile-ent报道，Evans Data最新数据显示，有31%应用开发者目前在其产品中使用NFC技术，45%计划在未来12个月使用这一技术。

nfc smart poster(from hub.tappinn.com)

开发者对NFC技术的兴趣远超过语音识别和设备匹配技术。

4）据mobile-ent报道，Facebook日前宣布其英国月活跃用户比例同比上年已经增长至22%，在美国则增长18%。Facebook还指出，其移动用户甚至还将智能手机和平板电脑带到度假海滩上网。

facebook-mobile(from siliconangle.com)

数据还显示，用户通常一天10-15次开启Facebook应用，有7.51亿用户通过移动平台登录Facebook，同比上年增长54%。

5）据gamasutra报道，投资银行Digi-Capital创始人Tim Merel在最近发布报告指出，手机游戏在移动应用使用率中仍然居高不下，在2013年手机应用收益中占比72%（2010年占比40%），手机游戏盈利性比其他应用类型高4倍以上。（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）Distimo: Infinity Blade II’s free promo more than doubled its weekly revenue

by Matthew Diener

Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade II was recently given away during the App Store’s fifth birthday celebration, and the promo has turned into a boom business for Chair.

Based on the 5.7 million downloads that Infinity Blade II saw during the week-long promotion, Chair could have pocketed $27 million in sales after Apple’s cut.

Instead, the firm gave a $6.99 game away for free.

Revenue winner

But it turns out that the exposure at being featured had a noticeable uptick in the weekly revenue generated by the game.

Setting aside the ancillary revenue generated by downloads of the original Infinity Blade and the Infinity Blade: Awakening e-book, Distimo reports that Infinity Blade II’s weekly revenue was still more than double the figure generated in the week before the promotion.

“Despite the free offer, this game generated 2.4 times as much revenue as in the week before the free promotion,” detailed Distimo.

“This case shows that offering an application for free and passing on the one-off revenue from direct purchases can still have a positive effect on the overall revenue due to in-app purchases, supporting also results of our previous research.”

Curiously, Chair Entertainment’s publicist Laura Mustard downplayed the uptick in in-app purchase expenditures for Infinity Blade II following the promotion.

“While we normally notice an increase at times when we’ve done free promotions, we don’t think it’s significant, because the game is balanced in a way that does not require any IAP,” concluded Mustard.（source：pocketgamer）

2）Apps want to be free, and we love ads (report)

John Koetsier

In fact, the vast majority of us are very happy to have advertising, according to a recent report by Flurry, which powers analytics for nearly 350,000 apps. The evidence? In 2011, 80 percent of apps were free. Today, 90 percent of apps are free, with monetization provided via good old we-gather-an-audience-and-sell-its-attention strategy that has worked since the dawn of modern media.

By inevitable corollary, the slice of apps that ask us to fork over cold hard cash has shrunk to a skinny little 10 percent wedge.

“We simply see this as the outcome of consumer choice: People want free content more than they want to avoid ads or to have the absolute highest quality content possible,” Flurry’s Mary

Ellen Gordon writes.

That data is from the Apple app store, which has the best historical data, Flurry says, since it has been in operation longest. But Android pricing is even cheaper — yes, the perception is reality — and there’s really only one place where we’re paying somewhat significant prices for apps.

That would be iPad.

iPad app pricing has traditionally been higher than iPhone or Android, and Flurry’s numbers bear that out. While the average app on Google Play is just $0.06 and the average app for iPhone is $0.19, iPad’s average app price is $0.50. That’s almost nine times the average Android price and 2.5 times the average iPhone price.

Flurry says that’s because “iPad users tend to be bigger spenders than owners of other devices, including iPhone,” and while there’s some overlap between the circle of iPad owners and iPhone owners, iPad owners have higher incomes than iPhone or Android users.

Interestingly, Flurry tested if the pricing behavior — trending to free — was just a result of developer groupthink, or a result of actual informed decision-making.

What the company discovered is that developers who have done pricing experiments such as reducing the price of an app to free to boost downloads for a day or week tend to make the experiment the rule. In other words, once developers have tasted the flow of users that results from free, they get addicted and keep their app free.

Which, of course, means more ads for all of us.

But, we seem to be OK with that.

“While consumers may not like in-app advertising, their behavior makes it clear that they are willing to accept it in exchange for free content, just as we have in radio, TV and online for decades,” Gordon writes. “In light of that, it seems that the conversation about whether apps should have ads is largely over.”（source：venturebeat）

3）45 per cent of app developers to integrate NFC within the next year

by Zen Terrelonge

Contactless communications favoured ahead of voice and device pairing.

Apple continues to ignore the NFC technology that was widely expected to appear in its iPhone 5 and instead opted for the ‘Airdrop’ over-the-top sharing service in iOS 7.

Companies like BlackBerry and Samsung have supported NFC, however, and 31 per cent of app developers are currently using the technology in their creations, with 45 per cent to do so within 12 months.

In fact, the research from Evans Data shows developers are more interested in the tapping tech than voice recognition and device pairing.

Popular use cases for NFC are security and access – such as keycards and boarding passes – while social networking and commerce are among other drivers.

Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, said: “NFC is the next evolutionary step in mobile computing. It‘s clear that it’s going to change the way we perform everyday actions such as opening a locked door, getting on an airplane, or making a purchase at a store.

“But developers also have plans for the technology that include games, measurements, and connections to appliances, cars or other devices. The extent to which NFC will impact us is only
constrained by the imagination of the developers.”（source：mobile-ent）

4）Facebook mobile monthly active users up 22 per cent in the UK

by Zen Terrelonge

Calls on advertisers to wake up and smell the business.

Facebook has been mobile crazy over the past year or so, and reveals that the number of mobile monthly active users has climbed by 22 per cent and 18 per cent year-on-year in June in the UK and US respectively.

With the UK experiencing a scorching summer, Facebook notes that its mobile users are even taking their smartphones and tablets to the beach to stay connected.

The social network notes that traditional forms of advertising normally suffer at this time of the year due to people making the most of the weather, pointing out this isn’t the case when brands advertise on its service.

If looking for further proof, stats show that people open the Facebook app 10-15 times a day, while 751m people us Facebook on mobile, which is up 54 per cent on last year.

James Quarles, Facebook regional director for the UK and Southern Europe, said: “Facebook is the place that they’re spending all their time so with the right message sent to the right intended audience, it’s a really incredible marketing opportunity for the summer.

“People like Pimm’s who I think have a very strong association with summer months and with tennis have created what they call Pimm’s o’clock and trying to look at periods where the weather
is nice outside to have very targeted publishing to encourage people to consider drinking Pimm’s. They made a post over the Wimbledon period to congratulate Andy Murray.”（source：mobile-ent）

5）’Post-Zynga IPO, many investors have exited the games market completely’

By Mike Rose

Despite the fact that there’s fundamental market growth in the mobile game industry, there’s “a significant investment gap in the games market,” as many investors turned away from the games
industry following the lackluster Zynga IPO.

This is according to a new report from digital investment bank Digi-Capital, whose founder Tim Merel says that many venture capital games investors “have exited the games market completely.”

This has led to a mismatch between investment supply and demand, he adds, such that capital markets are not taking advantage of the long-term growth of the mobile game space. “There could also be mispricing across both private and public games markets in 2013,” he says.

“In our experience we haven’t seen a market as large, growing as fast as mobile apps/games,” Merel goes on to say. “We think this could be the highest growth, large technology market today.

Yet capital markets aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity.”

“Particularly in mobile, we think the opportunity cost of not investing is potentially more significant than the investment itself,” he adds. “As well as being a major opportunity, mobile
disruption could pose a significant risk for those who don’t learn how to play.”

Mobile games continue to dominate mobile usage, the report states, accounting for 72 percent of mobile app revenues in 2013, up from 40 percent in 2010. The report also notes that mobile
games monetize around 4 times more effectively than other app types.（source：gamasutra）