How Much Do Whales Spend?
We break down user spending in a few example free to play mobile games according to the commonly accepted standards in the space...
Hello there and thanks for reading!
As I mentioned last week I’ve recently been working on some planning tools for mobile/Free to Play games recently and - yesterday - I finally got them to the point where I can share some results!
One of my (many) goals in producing these models was to find a way to help F2P game designers and teams as a whole to understand the spend depth1 they need in order to create a successful game. It’s not enough to say that it should be very large or even infinite - designers need to understand the users that they’re designing for and how they might behave.
Conventional wisdom on the subject says that spenders in Free to Play games fall into three groups:
Low spenders (minnows) - 50% of spenders who might spend up to $10 in a game.
Medium spenders (dolphins) - 40% who might spend $10-100
High spenders (whales) - the balancing 10% who spend upwards of $100.
But how much are those high spenders actually spending? Well, in a lot of cases it’s thousands.
By combining the above with publicly available information from AppMagic2 we ran the numbers on three successful games and the results are as follows:
In Kick the Buddy (a fairly simple HyperCasual game) high spenders are spending about the same as in the other cohorts as the game has limited opportunities to purchase.
In the much acclaimed Marvel Snap the high spenders are spending an average of $913 which means the top-spenders will be spending a lot more than that.
In Cookie Run: Kingdom these spenders are spending a whopping $1297, again, on average.
To put this into further perspective, that means that in Cookie Run: Kingdom the high-spenders are generating over 84% of the total revenue generated by the game and, therefore, without them and without sufficient spend depth the game would not be business-viable.
I’ve included a screen-shot of the analysis here or there’s a pdf available here.
I’m now ready to start testing the full model with a few select studios. If you know anyone who might be interested in trying them out with me then please do send them our way.
Links from the above screenshot for further information:
PDF version of the data above: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dC4fP5z9BjxpwGHqn6sda__cQRpyMydt/view?usp=sharing
Whales, Minnows, Dolphins: https://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/whales-dolphins-and-minnows-the-beating-heart-of-a-free-to-play-game/
App metrics from: https://appmagic.rocks/
Spend depth in mobile games: https://superscale.com/resources/ask-the-experts-1/
“Spend Depth” - i.e. the amount of money it should be possible to spend in a given game.
Revenue per Download (RpD) which is essentially the same as Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) excluding advertising revenue.
