Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-29605676-20180110153624/@comment-31668816-20180111122427

Amrosa wrote:

Shineysideup wrote: Just one, of many stories reporting virtually the same thing.

http://www.businessofapps.com/top-mobile-game-publishers-earn-most-revenue-from-in-app-purchases-not-advertising/ I'd like to see it in an audited financial statement, however EA's 10Q filings do not go into that level of detail.

The article you link to does say that over 20% of EAs revenue comes from the Star Wars title(s). There, loot boxes, bought as IAPs likely have a much bigger impact.

Also, for RR3, there are pause points in the game and breaks in the action that make sense to play ads. Reducing service times on cars, R&D time on Upgrades, and delivery times on R$ Car purchases. Other apps, such as Madden or FIFA or Star Wars have less of these breaks in the action or maintenance after an event. Play ads to remove a player from the DL? Play ads to escape a Star Destroyer?

Ads in RR3 also generate a fungible, in app currency, that can be used towards microtransactions. We have no situation, yet, where the only way to buy a car or a track would be to purchase the equivalent of a loot box and hope that you randomly get the car that cannot be obtained any other way. We also don't have the situation where a car, say the MP4-X was purchasable for $250, but in return you can use it in any WTTT, on all four stages or paying $20 per Stage allows you to rent the top car, then I could see where RR3 would get more revenue from IAP than ads, but as a platform, RR3 is much more amenable to ads for revenue generation.

These figures are behind paywalls, so I can only go by what appeared in the Google description, but it looks like Real Racing 3 has, on average $300,000 in revenue per month... that means about $3.6MM in revenue per year, which seems rather low considering the quality of the game, and the licenses they have to pay for, such as to Porsche and Ferrari. So I would take many of the numbers on the web with a grain of salt and say that unless it is in a financial statement, I am not prepared to take these articles at their word. Whether or not it's still the case I know not, but ferrari used to demand around 25% (again I'm not sure whether revenue or profit) for featuring their cars in a video game. It's why I refuse to pay full price for one of their cars in RR3 as I dislike the company for other reasons.