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Zoya Street
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Numbers from GDC

By on March 19, 2012

I’ve uploaded our first round of statistics gathered at GDC to the spreadsheet posts! Don’t forget to check them regularly for the latest benchmarks on your most important performance indicators. And if you have any figures I haven’t picked up so far, please email Zoya or Nicholas.

ARPPU: APB Reloaded now has an ARPPU of $30, up slightly from $28 in August of 2010, when its creator Realtime Worlds went into administration. Based on their experience with other free-to-play multiplayer games, Bjorn Book-Larsson showed that this is within Reloaded’s benchmark for FPS games of $20-50, but short of their benchmark for RPGs, which is $40-100. He said that the company’s strategy is to use gameplay data to iterate game design in order to maximise retention and conversion.

Conversion rates: APB Reloaded has a conversion rate of 7%, having increased from an initial rate of 4% shortly after their free-to-play re-release. Bjorn Book-Larsson from Reloaded said that their target conversion rate is 10%, which includes both DLC and premium packages. Reloaded’s experience with other games indicates that monthly revenue from free to play games reaches its peak 1000 days after release, so he hopes for more growth in conversion in the months to come.

Number of downloads: Foldit, the protein-themed 3D puzzler lauded by the educational community, has been downloaded 240,000 times. That’s not a great number, but it was enough to get thousands of players cooperating to make sense of an AIDS protein that had been puzzling scientists for 15 years.

About Zoya Street

I’m responsible for all written content on the site. As a freelance journalist and historian, I write widely on how game design and development have changed in the past, how they will change in the future, and how that relates to society and culture as a whole. I’m working on a crowdfunded book about the Dreamcast, in which I treat three of the game-worlds it hosted as historical places. I also write at Pocketgamer.biz and The Borderhouse.