New report highlights how much kids spend on in-app purchases

Following an investigation by the Office of Fair Trading into free-to-play apps and games aimed at children, there's plenty of heat on how mobile developers present in-app purchases to kids. But a new report from research agency Dubit suggests that these fears may have been blown out of proportion. The company surveyed 355 children who play mobile games, and found that only 87 had made in-app purchases -- while around 1 percent had spent more than $16 in one game session. While many have suggested that the high-price points of in-app purchases in kids' games wrongly encourage children to spend lots of money in these games, Dubit's report found that not a single child surveyed had ever made a single purchase greater than $16. The report noted that across all children with permission from parents to buy in-app purchases in mobile games, the average single purchase was around $3.33. You can find the whole report in slide form here. It's worth noting that Dubit works with numerous game developers to build brands for their kids' games, and is also working on apps for kids both as a studio-for-hire, and through its own tech demos.