The recent mobile game release “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood” is currently number eight on the top grossing app list on the App Store charts. The game’s amazing $700,000 USD per day revenue rate has surprised observers such as Forbes and CNN, who had labeled the game an unlikely hit.
The media didn’t question Ms. Kardashian’s star appeal, it questioned the game’s appeal to a broad mobile gaming audience, an audience long believed to be dominated by males in general and teens and college students in particular. It might be true that Ms. Kardashian’s fan club is not packed with teenage boys and young men attending college, but the fact is this: the mobile gaming audience is not what is used to be.
A new study conducted by mobile analytics firm Flurry, found that females spend more time and money on mobile games, and are more loyal to these games than men are. Flurry’s study was based on a a sample of successful games that reach a total of 1.1 million devices on the Flurry platform.
The study found that women make 31% more in-app purchases than men, and spend 35% more time in gaming apps than men do.
The same study also showed that females are more loyal than males when it comes to player retention. Women showed a 42% higher 7-day retention on average versus males. While the numbers were all measured on a worldwide basis, there was little difference in the numbers when Flurry looked at the US-only audience.
Flurry’s researchers first thought perhaps the Kardashian game might be skewing their results, so they looked at the weekly time spent for 19 categories of iOS games. Their results are shown below. If a category skews female, it is colored pink, if the category skews male the bar is blue, gray indicates a neutral category.
The chart shows nine categories skewing female, with six categories skewing male and four categories split almost evenly between males and females. Males dominated in card/battle, strategy, tower defense, sports and action/RPG games.
The broadening of the mobile gaming base is good news for advertisers, as they spend money on mobile advertising in an attempt to reach all categories of gamers.
