Predictive Analytics for Games and Apps Blog | Ninja Metrics

The Biggest Trends in Social Gaming

The popularity of social gaming has exploded in recent years thanks to the growth of mobile devices. With cross-platform compatibility, playing with friends from around the world has become more convenient than ever.

Game market research firm Newzoo recently put together a report highlighting the current trends in social gaming and where they’re headed. Currently, players around the world spend 1 billion hours each day playing games (more than 5x the amount they spend on YouTube or Facebook) - and looking ahead, mobile gaming is expected to generate more than $100B by 2017.

What is churn?

Churn is quitting, plain and simple. It’s bad, but it’s also inevitable. No one lives forever, no one plays forever, and no game lasts forever. In practical terms, this means that working with churn is all about minimizing it rather than eliminating it completely.

Churn of course hits your bottom line, but it’s different depending on your business model. If you’re running a subscription model it’s very straightforward. You lose X dollars/month if the player drops. If you are running a free-to-play or microtransaction-based title, you are losing the player’s particular spending. And, as most people know, player spending is highly skewed, with a small minority spending the most, and the vast majority spending nothing. As a general rule, you care the most about the “whales” and want to prevent their churn. Social ripple effects (below) are an exception to that thinking.