If you’ve been following the mobile arena for any time now, you would have known that Zynga acquired “Draw Something” developer OMGPOP for a cool $200 million. Before that, OMGPOP was bringing in six figures a day in revenue. It’s a true testament to the ability of mobile games on Android and iOS to make developers obscenely wealthy. On the other hand, the success of apps on Windows Phone 7 has been relatively ignored by the media.
FourBros Studios came out yesterday with a post on their Web site showing that Windows Phone 7 games can be successful. How successful? The studio is making over $1,000 a day now with their game, Taptitude. The wider adoption of Windows Phone 7 obviously led to their newfound success, but there were other factors at play as well.
First and foremost, the game is free. That’s an obvious boost to app adoption since everybody likes free. If your app is free, you still have to make money off of it somehow though. On the more popular Android and iOS platforms, it’s done either through ads or in app purchases. FourBros Studios used Microsoft’s pubCenter to display ads on their game.
The developer breaks down how pubCenter works for them. They say that you are paid for the number of “impressions” you earn each day. This is paid out per thousand impressions in an amount referred to as “eCPM.” Starting out, they were making very little money as they only got a few thousand impressions a day. Instead of throwing in the towel though, the team kept at it with constant free updates that added more to the game. This led to more people playing and keeping those that were already playing.
All of this effort paid off in the end as they are now at nearly 100 million ad impressions. This isn’t the only factor in play though. At a point during last year, their “eCPM” was at $3 which boosted their revenue significantly. That was short lived, however, as it went back to $1 so they had to rely on impressions again to make money.
It’s worked marvelously for them as they are now getting about 1 million impressions per day. This equates to about $1,000 a day in revenue. For a small team and indie game like Taptitude, that’s really impressive. It’s made even more impressive considering that it’s on the Windows Phone 7 platform.
So let’s break down what makes this app successful. FourBros Studio built a game and stuck with it, they used pubCenter to monetize their free app and they provide constant updates to keep active players engaged while attracting new players. Would you look at that? That’s the exact same strategy every single successful app uses. So before you start making fun of Windows Phone 7 as a worthless platform to develop for, just know that the same strategies that make an app successful applies to any and all platforms.
For all the juicy details and charts, check out FourBros Studios analysis of their game’s success. This should be a sign to other developers that it might be high time to invest in the Windows Phone platform. The audience is growing and they’re looking for quality content like Taptitude.
[h/t: Business Insider]