What are ARPU benchmarks for mobile gaming genres?

Question

I've read loads of articles and blogs, all touting the same 2-5% conversion rate and average retention metrics, but I've never seen anything mentioned around what the industry average mobile game ARPU is.

I'm aware this will vary greatly across genre, but any ideas or pointers in the right direction would be great, as well as any tips on predicting what the ARPU could be for a title in a specific genre.

Comments

What are you trying to solve by answering this question?

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I'm trying to figure out how to pitch to investors the potential return on a game based on a specific genre.

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You should be looking up CPIs, LTVs and retention then.

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Well this comes back to my original question... how do I found out what the ARPU or average LTV is for a specific genre? CPI information is readily available.

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You can assume that CPI = LTV in the long run. You would never want to have a marketing budget that really goes beyond that long term.

Answer 1

This is an antiquated way of looking at monetization -- I don't know of any serious companies that think about user metrics broadly in terms of global ARPU or LTV. The companies that do user acquisition well at scale tend to focus on Day 30 - 60 - 90 ROAS.

The most successful strategy games should regularly produce blended ARPDAU metrics over $1 (much higher during events and sales) and often look to fully recoup spend in under 180-240 days. Casual games might look for recoup at the lower end of that timeline scale. Hypercasual games tend to want to recoup their UA spend inside of a week.

Comments

Thanks Eric, that makes sense, but then how would you calculate potential revenue/return for a game, say for in a pitch to investors. You don't have any ROAS data to work with.

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You could turn it around: extrapolate your RPI (revenue per install) from early measurements and calculate the CPI you can afford to hit e.g. a D180 full recoup - or measure your CPI and calculate the RPI you require. This will give you a more specific benchmark to compare against than generic market RPIs / LTVs.