A change app store/google play potentially could benefit from

Hello, my name is Chris of Ardoetia Productions, I have been looking into App Store and Google Play. Now our company will release one game to the mobile market because it was a small and fun project and we don’t actually need any revenue from the game currently. But the upcoming projects we have planned this is not viable so we are not developing any more games for the platform in the near future (although we MIGHT release premium for iPad/tablet)

Generally the games I personally like is the games where I can be free from the demon of ads and blood sucking in-app purchases.

When I thought about this I came up with a potential improvement.

Now when I have researched the eligibility of this I have taken some insight into stats provided by different sources. Some numbers is officially provided and some is estimations.

Well to begin with, the improvement I have in mind it would be;

Having subscription based store section, now hold on, the reason I think this could be applicable is because of NetFlix, Spotify and other services that aims towards subscription. Now on steam this would be a harder sell as games has a established price tag which is way more than 0. Which is clearly not the case on mobiles.

So here is now is some numbers, as of June 2014 the number of active devices given from Apple is around 800 million, and the Android has around 1 billion.

Further more the downloaded apps seem 25 billion from June 2014 to June 2015. This means the average user downloads around 31.25 apps per person.

Android was harder to find but seems like 40 billions in 1 year which means 40 apps per person.

App Store seems to have gotten 10 billion dollars of revenue from games and apps in 2014, this is around 12.5 dollars per person, which in turn is 0.4 dollars per person per app in average.

On the other hand it looks like Google Play raked in about 1.3 billion, this is around 1.3 dollars per person, which in turn is 0.03 dollars per person per app.

Now this is what Apple and Google earns, and both these parties takes around 30%, so the money spent is more likely at 0.1 per person per app on Google Play (0.07 to developers) and 41.7 per person per app on App Store(29 to developers)

Now with this information it looks like it would be easier to get the system implemented in iOS due to the fact that they are more used to using money than Android. However, if a subscription based concept is around 12 dollars per month, if only 1% of the total users purchases this, that would be 216 million dollars per month, if the split then is 30% to Apple/Google this is 151 million dollars per month to developers. Since we have used yearly downloads here, it would then  mean 

151 / 3.3(apps downloaded average per month) = 45 million dollar per app on Google Play

151 / 2.7(apps downloaded average per month) = 58 million dollar per app on App Store. 

Now this number is given that the subscription user downloads the same amount of apps than non-subscription and let’s be honest, that is unlikely.

Another thing here is that with this system there would likely that the 70% revenue split would be based of the time used in each app, say a player plays one game 50% and the other two 25% then the revenue split would be 35% to one and 17.5% to the other two games. 

Now this in turn means that 12 / 100 * 70 = 8.4 dollars, 4.2 usd to the dominating app per person and 2.1 to the less dominating apps. 

If the game then gets 1000 downloads this is 4200 USD, which is way more per person revenue than normal. Retention would be an important factor as well.

Now here is how this could really improve the market. 

If a company can create a game with no ads, not that good reason to have pay to play (freemium) in the way that Clash of Clans or other games does things. This could easily increase quality of games, enjoyment of games would improve and the market would generally be better.

The revenue split would improve the quality of downloads a lot (less marketing required to survive) as many of the games that stands for the revenue of games churns players at a dangerous rate (more marketing to get new players in to replace the leaving players)

This would revive premium games, long lasting premium games would loose it’s name of obsolete.

The plus side is that the games that has a «free» and a «paid» version of the game could be one app with «App Store +» and «Google Play+», and the same goes with in-app that can check for if the user is a subscriber or not.

Another fantastic thing this could provide is a less crowded area, games tagged for subscription needed could have a specific store section (a «soft reset»)

Downsides, the issue here is however that there should or has to be some way to have quality games here, so the process would have quality control.

The number of users could potentially be low

The prices for subscription will be different due to different income so some work needed on that front.

It should be stated that there should be clear rules on «accepted IAP» in the + section of the store (pay to progress could be one that is not allowed, but aesthetic is allowed)

This is a long post and is purely thoughts I have made, I would love feedback from you guys what you think about it and how you would improve or if you disagree for any reason. Now the numbers here is what I could find, the numbers would be different.