Depending on who you talk to, Apple's involvement in the commercial handheld games market is either non-existent or significant. Unfortunately, it seems to be very hard to actually get any hard details on how App Store sales break down! Still, we should never let the lack of hard data get in the way of some pondering! Though to give fair warning: the following stats involve a number of extrapolations and assumptions and may well be completely inaccurate. Further discussion is welcomed :)
Back in June, Steve announced that Apple had paid out $1 billion to App Store developers. Given that developers receive 70% of the sale price, this means that total App Store revenue is in the region of $1.43 billion. With a bit of help from 148Apps.biz, we can have a go at figuring out how many game-units have actually been sold.
As of June 2010, there were approximately 200,000 apps in the store. Of these, approximately 30,000 were games - or 15% of the total. Also, their data indicates that just 30% of App Store titles are free, so we can infer that there were around 20,000 pay-for games on the App Store at that time.
Of course, the fact that 15% of the available items are games doesn't mean that 15% of sales are from games. And there's a second issue: the average price for an application is $2.86, whereas the average price for a game is $1.20.
Still, if we do assume that games are responsible for 15% of unit sales
Comments
Post a Comment