Everyone knows Clash of Clans and Candy Crush make loads of money but what about the rest of the games? Is there a way to work out how well games in the App Store retain and monetise players using just publicly available data? Ric has built a system which harvests data from Apple and extracts hidden info; business intelligence that is not available elsewhere. Most notably he has charted the ‘hidden winners’, the games with the best ‘earning power’, and the results are quite surprising. In this talk Ric will explain why he went looking for this data, how he did, it and most interestingly, what trends he discovered and what developers can learn from this.

1. Data Mining the App Store:
Hidden Winners & Whale Spotting
@_RicMoore
ric@crispybyte.com

2. Ric Moore

3. Why mine data?

4. De-risking Development
• Where’s the mobile games market at?
• How do you become at top 100 developer?
• Are there hidden gems we can spot in the App Store charts?
• Can you play ‘Moneyball’ with game development?

5. Where’s the mobile games market at?

6. Top Grossing Games – iPhone, USA, 2015

7. 56%
32%
12%
Public VC Independent
Market share
Top 100 Grossing Developers, iPhone USA, 2015

8. 9
7
6
5
5
4
2 1
56 Games - 22 Public Companies

9. Top Grossing Independent Games, iPhone, USA
#28
#67
#91
#56
#79
#93
#62
#81
#97
#64
#84
#100
$7.5k/day
$35k/day
Source: reflection.io

10. Top 100 grossing, iPhone, USA, 2015 - Genre Split
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Casual Casino RPG Strategy &
Simulation
Arcade Sports Word & Quiz
What genres dominate?

11. How do you become a Top 100 developer?

13. 5
8
14
12
3
2
1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Number of founders

14. 43.45%
34.48%
6.90%
11.03%
2.76%
Management Tech Art Design Marketing
Co-founder's Background

15. Investors Check List
• Founding team of 2 - 4 people
• Management experience
• Tech experience
• Founders worked together before
• Games industry experience
• Worked on a hit game

16. Hidden Winners

17. Rank History Example
Grossing Rank Download Rank

18. Hidden Winners, iPhone, USA, March 2015

21. http://reflection.io/

22. 0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
1 25 50 75 100
Numberofdownloads
Rank
USA Top 100 Downloads, 1 day
Source: reflection.io

23. 0
200000
400000
600000
800000
1000000
1200000
1400000
1600000
1800000
1 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
RevenueUSD
Rank
USA Top 100 Grossing, 1 day
Source: reflection.io

24. Hidden Winners iPhone USA March 2015 - Weighted

25. Whale Spotting

26. 新部落守卫战-神兽驾到 第一塔防策略游戏
by Tencent – reached top 10 grossing USA, iPhone
‫فزعة‬
세븐나이츠 for kakao
by Lumba – reached top 100 grossing
by Netmarbles – reached top 120 grossing

27. Are they doing this?

28. So can you play ‘Moneyball’
with game development?

29. • It’s been going on for years
• Charts lead the way:
• DAU
• MAU
• Grossing
YES!!!

30. 2007

31. #1
#2
#3
2010

32. #1
#2
2012

33. etc. etc. etc...
2009

34. In the pipeline
• Momentum Chart – the games with the biggest gains
• Stickiness Chart – the games that have staying power
• Soft Launch Chart – the games in soft launch, the ones to watch
• New genres – using metadata to define new categories of games

35. See the Hidden Winners chart at
http://crispybyte.com
@_RicMoore
ric@crispybyte.com