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Nicholas Lovell
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Spend once, spend twice, 25% of you will spend thrice

By on March 29, 2011

I’m not sure how I missed this, but thanks to Diane LaGrange of Ico Partners for bringing it to my attention in a recent blog post on the price of commitment.

Social Gold, the virtual goods monetisation business owned by Google, has published an infographic on the behaviour of gamers within the social and online games operated by their clients. The chart is useful overall, not least for pointing out that the “average” social gamer spends $60. (Although, given that whales spend over $1,000 on a single game, this average can be very misleading – this is a power-law distribution, not a normal distribution).

It also confirms the logic behind my basic rule of free-to-play: the 0-1-100 rule. In essence, once you get a player to spend a dollar, 56% of them come back to spend a second time and 25% of them spend three or more times.

If that’s not a good reason to get them to spend once, I don’t know what is.

Social Gold infographic

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com