What is the download pattern of a freemium (or paymium) game?

• Tweet
• Pin It

A friend of mine has asked me how I would expect the downloads of a freemium game to be spread over the first year after launch. As you can probably tell from the question, he is trying to build a forecast of when revenue will arrive for the title, using an adapted version of the GAMESbrief spreadsheet.

I gave two answers:

1. The new user acquisition is in your control. It is about how much you are prepared to spend on customer acquisition. Turn on the CPA tap, you get customers. Add a multiplier for "virality" (I mean that in the loosest sense of word-of-mouth, reviews, Apple love) and that’s your downloads or users.
2. Downloads don’t matter. MAUs do. You can get MAUs by finding new users (expensive, difficult) or by keeping existing users (Difficult, based on game design, cheap-ish). If your model depends on new downloads, you are doing F2P wrong.

That said, it seems to me that there might a rule of thumb out there. A very senior person at Ubisoft once told me they could forecast the sales of a console title to within 1,000 units based on the first weekend’s sales numbers. Is there something similar that exists for F2P? If so, I haven’t seen or heard it yet. Could you help me, and my friend, by helping answer the question of whether there is a download pattern for F2P games.

Links to other stories, anecdotes, comments from your experience or hard numbers are all welcome.

Related Posts

• 

  Can consoles support large F2P games? They already do
  Can consoles support large F2P games? They already do
• 

  StarTrek Fleet Command has some pretty impressive retention numbers
  StarTrek Fleet Command has some pretty impressive retention numbers
• 

  Raph Koster’s analysis of the ways to make a successful service game
  Raph Koster’s analysis of the ways to make a successful service game
• 

  Local notifications make a resurgence and 43% of users accept them
  Local notifications make a resurgence and 43% of users accept them