Eric Johnson

Recent Posts by Eric Johnson

As Investment Rises, Games Are Still Raking In a Huge Slice of the Mobile Revenue Pie

After a dip in investment spurred by Zynga’s fizzled IPO, investors are slowly coming back to games, according to a report out this week from investment bank Digi-Capital.

The Q3 analysis report, authored by managing director Tim Merel, said this bounce-back — a 35 percent increase year over year to $876 million in investment value — may reflect the “potential dominance” of Asia. There, mobile and online games revenue is projected to extend its already strong lead as compared to other regions of the world.

On the consumer end of things, though, one of the most compelling factoids continues to be the gap between revenue for mobile games and for all other mobile apps. This graph from the Digi-Capital report tells the whole story:

The split is not new, of course, but this graph shows better than most how game revenue is still growing while non-game revenue appears to be leveling off. One likely explanation for that growth: In-game purchases may be consumed and regularly replaced by the small subset of spending-happy whales, while a comparably lucrative monetization model for most non-game apps has yet to emerge.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google