At a Google I/O session today covering monetization in Google Play, Ibrahim Elbouchikhi, Google Play product manager for commerce and monetization, revealed that in-app revenues increased 700 percent year-over-year from May 2012 to April 2013.

Elbouchikhi also says since launching the ability to monetize through subscriptions a year ago, revenue has doubled each quarter. He notes internet radio service Pandora as a perfect example of a top grossing app which monetizes its users via a subscription model.

Android for tablets is starting to show some growth now, Elbouchikhi reveals. In the past 12 months, Google was seeing a 1.7 times higher purchase rate of apps on tablets compared to apps on smartphones. “The additional cost of optimizing your apps for tablets is well worthwhile,” he says. Additionally, there’s a 2.2 times higher purchase rate on recent platform versions compared to prior ones. “Take advantage of the latest features, whether its Google+ sign-in or all the latest APIs released at I/O this week.” On top of all this growth, average revenue per user (ARPU) is 2.5 times greater year-over-year.

Below is a chart, showing that higher-rated apps in Google Play monetize better:

Google hasn’t been slowing down at all when it comes to adding and optimizing forms of payment. In July 2012, Google introduced the Google Play gift cards at retail. Google also launched promotional campaigns for Google Play credit by partnering with pre-paid phone providers, offering a $50 Google Play credit if a user purchases a particular pre-paid phone, for example. Carrier billing, one of the most lucrative forms of monetization in various parts of the world, is now available to 50 percent of Google Play’s daily active users. Google also optimized the purchase flow, making it more contextual, faster and simpler. According to Elbouchikhi, Google has dropped latency by 35 percent when users make purchases. Looking forward, Elbouchikhi says Google will invest more in expanding Google Play gift cards to more markets as well as carrier billing. (more…)

Editor’s note: Arcade action game Nimble Quest is the latest offering from Tiny Towers and Pocket Planes developer NimbleBit. Kevin Oke, Lead Designer at both Adrian Crook & Associates, a social-mobile game design consultancy, and PlayRank, a second screen startup, analyzes the stickiness in Nimble Quest. He previously wrote a guest post for Inside Mobile Apps that analyzed engagement in Supercell’s Clash of Clans.

NimbleBit, creators of Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, released their latest title the aptly named Nimble Quest at the end of March. While it’s a fun game, I’ve found four key issues described below that I believe limit its stickiness and in turn, its ability to monetize.

According to AppData, after a strong start peaking at No. 6 on the top free iPhone apps chart for the games genre, it has slid to No. 217 as of this writing. Its rank on the top grossing iPhone apps chart for the games genre is at No. 190. These positions may be at least partially attributable to the issues I found.

The Compulsion Loop

This is the biggest barrier for Nimble Quest to overcome. The nature of its compulsion loop makes for a very grind heavy experience that hinders its stickiness.

It’s a rule of thumb in game design that the shorter the loop, the more addictive the experience. By analyzing the loop (diagram above), one can see that unless the player is willing to spend hard currency, they have to restart from the beginning every time. The variable session length nature of the game means that as the player and their friends improve, it takes more and more time for them to challenge their ever-increasing high scores.

Essentially Nimble Quest is banking on players getting invested enough in leaderboard competition to start paying once the grind becomes too much to bear. This is a risky hook to rely on here, as it’s one that is much better suited to games with more of a sense of permanence and ownership, like city builders and strategy games such as Kingdoms of Camelot by Kabam. The reason being that without such permanence, it’s much easier for the player to decide to quit when the grinding gets tiresome.

As in any freemium game leveraging the player’s time for money, if the player tires of the grind too quickly and churns out, they can’t be monetized. However Nimble Quest is especially at risk here because of their compulsion loop. Fixed session lengths with level progression and difficulty determined by a party XP level would have provided more stickiness. (more…)

Japanese mobile-social gaming giant DeNA recently gave a talk at the 2013 Game Developers Conference about the success of live events, a gameplay feature, in its Japanese RPG card battler Blood Brothers. DeNA also has live events in other games such as card battle game Marvel: War of Heroes, which just received a new raid boss event featuring Deadpool.

We chatted this week with Chris Plummer, DeNA’s general manager of all North American game studios, about the importance of live events in mobile-social games, especially for monetization.

Inside Mobile Apps: At the 2013 Game Developers Conference, DeNA revealed that events were key to the success of Blood Brothers. Is this a feature that’s as successful in other games from DeNA?

Chris Plummer, DeNA general manager of all North American game studios (pictured right): All of our current first-party games host live events on a regular basis and many of our third-party titles do as well. We feel it’s an essential part of operating a compelling live service that delights and entertains our entire audience of always-connected, mobile players.

IMA: What constitutes an event and what are the different types of events that are in DeNA games?

Plummer: The most important factor for an event is for the experience to be entertaining and engaging. You can’t think about running sales or pushing new content live with a fancy name and expect it to delight or perform like an event. Events must be experienced, played and engaged with deeply. Live events should have their own narrative, features or other elements that define the experience and are unique to the event. Similarly, event rewards should include special items or other valuable things that can only be earned by participating in the event. Limited-time exclusivity is another key element to any good event. ‘Experience it now before it’s over!’ The thought of missing out on a cool experience or rare reward is a powerful concept.

Perhaps the most important ingredient of all is the hourly live operation that happens behind the scenes during each and every DeNA event. Our live event teams work nonstop to ensure that everything stays balanced, exciting and that everyone has a good experience regardless of their level or skill. Live event analysis, tuning and operation is an art form all its own and something DeNA is particularly skilled at. A well-tuned, constantly monitored event will deliver so much more fun and perform significantly better than an event operated without a high degree of care and dedication.

IMA: Other developers, such as a direct competitor like GREE, run events in its mobile-social games as well. What differentiates DeNA’s events in its games versus the competition?

Plummer: What separates DeNA’s events from our competitors really boils down to our focus on delighting customers. A lot of talent, passion and energy goes into crafting and refining every one of our events and it shows in the final experience. After each event, we review all the details and challenge ourselves to make the next event even more fun. In this way, our events are always more entertaining, more rewarding and more fun for players. Try them and you’ll see.

IMA: What effect do events have on the monetization of a game?

Plummer: The way we run events is the single most important factor influencing the monetization in our games. These are always-on, live games and important live services for our players. We operate them with that level of importance in order to unlock their full potential.

IMA: What makes an event success? Are you measuring by an increase in retention, average revenue per user, etc.?

Plummer: Ultimately, an event is a success if it delights our players and they eagerly anticipate the next event. Everything else falls into place if players are happy and having a fantastic time. By focusing on our customers, other benefits like increased engagement and monetization come naturally.

IMA: What’s the next evolution for the events gameplay feature in DeNA games in the future, such as raid boss events in the upcoming first-person shooter The Drowning?

Plummer: Events differ by game since each game has its own unique features, content and driving parameters. As such, new event types evolve based on the unique attributes of each game. You may see some similar event types in our games, like our very successful Raid Boss framework, but you will also see new and surprising event types unfolding as new game systems are released or existing games continue to grow.

Mobile game developer and publisher Pocket Gems today released a case study about its publishing program, where the company explained its publishing philosophy and process. It’s first two published games — Chasing Yello for Android and Amazing Ants for iOS — both saw more than two million installs in the first two weeks of its respective releases.

The purpose of the case study was to review the first two games Pocket Gems published and to share some information on how the games performed as well as more on the publishing process between Pocket Gems and the indie developers. Future developers can get a better sense as to how Pocket Gems works with developers, since many have asked Pocket Gems how its publishing process works.

“We had on our website that this is the general process, but here we can say here’s what we did with the first developers we worked with and get a better sense of what it actually looks like,” says Jameel Khalfan, who oversees publishing efforts for Pocket Gems.

The San Francisco-headquartered game studio, which was founded in 2009, first announced that it was adding a publishing side to its business in December 2012. The development house had revealed three games from indie developers it was publishing so far. The first game published by Pocket Gems was endless swimmer game Chasing Yello for Android in December 2012 from German developer Dreamfab and Danish developer Tactile Entertainment. The second title was Twyngo’s Lemmings-like puzzler Amazing Ants for iOS in January. Pocket Gems’ third announced title that was part of its initial publishing deal was we.R.play’s robot action title RoboQuest for iOS, which has yet to release. Khalfan says the game will launch “soon.”

Khalfan reiterated what CEO Ben Liu told Inside Mobile Apps last year, saying Pocket Gems didn’t believe there were any good publishing options for developers, so that’s why the company decided to fill that void.

“We only publish games that we love from a small group developers,” Khalfan says. “Our goal isn’t to go and publish a thousand games. Our goal is to find the best games and focus our time and attention on them rather than going for the shotgun approach.”

Pocket Gems helped Twyngo and Dreamfab through the entire publishing process including the design, engagement, and monetization phase, the testing phase and the launch phase. Khalfan adds that each developer Pocket Gems worked with needed help in one phase more than the other. Pocket Gems helped Twyngo decide whether it should release two versions of Amazing Ants — a light and full version — or a purely freemoim game with in-app purchase. Twyngo ultimately went with the latter. Dreamfab, which had already released Chasing Yello for iOS on its own, came to Pocket Gems for help with porting the title to Android. Due to the severe fragmentation when it comes to Android devices, Pocket Gems aided Dreamfab by telling the indie developer its best practices for which Android devices and operating system versions Dreamfab should support and not support.

“For each different game, it’s going to be a different approach from everything from the game design to the QA process to the launch and the ongoing marketing and analytics,” Khalfan says. “That’s the best approach for developers because they all want something a little bit different and they all have different skills sets, and they all have different things they are good at and things they want help on.”

Pocket Gems is now one of many major gaming giants such as DeNA, GREE, Zynga and Kabam which have invested into the publishing of third-party titles.

A fear many indie developers have when working with publishers is if their game doesn’t perform well, publishers will put less support and resources into the their game, while putting more into games that are performing well.

“We want to put in our all for every game that we publish, so that’s why we focus on a smaller set of games,” Khalfan says.

Khalfan says Pocket Gems is currently looking for more games to publish from all genres and primarily free-to-play. Developers interested in learning more about Pocket Gems’ publishing efforts can go here.

Mobile-social game developer and publisher Game Insight recently launched Dragon Eternity for iPad, a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

The free-to-play title features cross-platform play between the iPad version and browser-based version, which first launched in open beta last year, and now has more than one million users around the globe. The game’s cross-platform play allows for synchronous gameplay between players on either iPad or the web. Users can also stop and continue their play session from any platform, a feature more and more mobile games are starting to implement and see success with, such as King’s Candy Crush Saga.

Game Insight founder and CEO Alisa Chumachenko told Inside Mobile Apps that although Game Insight has seen success from their casual titles, a game for core players like Dragon Eternity was always in the back of  the team’s minds.

“While we definitely enjoy creating more casual titles for social and mobile, and have seen great success from games like Paradise Island, Airport City, and The Tribez, Dragon Eternity was something of a passion project for us,” she says.

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As the release for the horror first-person shooter The Drowning nears, Scattered Entertainment general manager Ben Cousins filled us in on even more details about DeNA’s highly-anticipated FPS.

Cousins showed Inside Mobile Apps a brief demo of the game starting with the tutorial, where users are taught the gesture-based controls by showing them on-screen prompts in the form of arrows to swipe left or right to look left and right as well as showing two dots on the screen that demonstrate how to aim and shoot baddies.

In the attack mode, which we reported on back in February, there’s a bar at the top-middle of the screen that indicates a player’s Frenzy Mode level. In Frenzy Mode, users can rack up more points for killing baddies, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time. Users can build up Frenzy by landing headshots, pistol whipping enemies and more.

There are two types of modes per level in the game: Attack and Defend. In the Defend mode, users are tasked with defending a certain spot, making sure strategically-placed barriers don’t get destroyed by enemies. Icons for each barrier are represented at the top of the screen, so when a barrier is being attacked, the user can tap the icon for the barrier in danger to make their character face that particular barrier.

The Drowning also features an energy mechanic in the form of gas, a typical mobile-social game mechanic that’s present in all DeNA games. Cousins adds that energy is not used as a monetization mechanic, but more as method to measure game sessions, so players don’t blow through the game by playing for 10 straight hours, for example.

“What we found is that if players rinse through half of the content in one play session, they are less likely to come back and finish the game,” Cousins says. “If you act like a bartender and say you’ve had enough drinks for tonight, people play for longer if you put something in place to control the game sessions.”

Cousins also elaborates on Charlotte’s junkyard, an area behind her workshop where users can spend real money for a chance to scavenge the area that’s filled rare items. Again, what item a user gets is random, but Cousins says if its an item a player doesn’t want, they can trade that item in for parts to heavily upgrade any of their existing weapons. The same works for all spare parts, users can give those parts to Charlotte to upgrade existing guns. In The Drowning, users can recognize the rarity of guns based on the text color for gun names, a similar practice seen in games like World of Warcraft and Diablo. Essentially, The Drowning is as much about the story as it’s about collecting, upgrading and customizing an arsenal of guns. Users can also purchase special items such as a cellphone, talking doll and a bomb to aid in combat. For example, the talking doll acts a distraction tactic, allowing the user to rack up a high score by killing a lot of enemies at once.

“There’s going to be a certain sort of player who just wants to collect, a player that’s just interested in the story and a player who’s just wants to be entertained,” he says. “We try to fulfill all of those different player types.”

Cousins, who previously told us that DeNA’s RPG card game Blood Brothers had a lot of influence on The Drowning, adds that people from DeNA’s Tokyo office were key in helping his team figure out the free-to-play model and were deeply involved in providing guidance for the design of the game.

“The Drowning is innovative in lots of ways with visuals, controls and play sessions,” Cousins says. “But behind this all, there’s a lot of smart DeNA-influenced work there. We see this as a melding of a Blood Brothers and Modern Combat 3.”

The Drowning, Cousins adds, takes Japanese gameplay mechanics such as those seen in gacha-fusion games like Rage of Bahamut, Blood Brothers, Hellfire, Fantasica and GungHo’s Puzzle and Dragons, which is tearing it up in the Japanese market right now. Essentially, a gacha-fusion game involves some sort of collecting like cards (in the case of the games mentioned) as well as a randomized element to collecting — the gacha part. The fusion part is when a game allows users to fuse things together, such as cards, to make new cards or using unused cards to level up other cards. Cousins says DeNA Tokyo took those gacha-fusion mechanics and westernized it for The Drowning.

Cousins tells us The Drowning is in the bug-fixing phase, and will only go as far as saying the title is “coming soon” for iOS and later in the year for Android.

While the eyes of the mobile development community at the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco are set on King’s Candy Crush Saga, SundayToz’s match-3 puzzler Anipang has silently been tearing up the Korean market on mobile for quite some time, the same way Candy Crush Saga is in the U.S. and other parts of the world. We sat down with SundayToz founder and CEO Kevin Lee, who told Inside Mobile Apps that Anipang is generating around $500,000 in revenue a day.

Anipang, which released in July 2012 and has already surpassed 25 million downloads worldwide (mostly from Korea), is a match-3 puzzle game where users play a one-minute round, where the objective is to get the highest score possible.

SundayToz was the first developer to get its game on messaging app KakaoTalk’s game platform. Lee tells us he spoke with the founder of the Korean company Kakao, and proposed the idea to turn the messenger app into a game platform, which led to the launch of Anipang for Kakao, and the rest is history. SundayToz tweaked around the viral mechanic for Anipang to fit with the messaging platform. That viral mechanic created for Anipang for Kakao was called “hearts.” Through a message via KakaoTalk, a user could send a “heart” to another user, if someone clicks the heart and they haven’t downloaded the game, the user will be sent to a page to download the game.

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Japanese RPG card battler Blood Brothers has been a huge hit both in Japan and in the U.S. At the Game Developers Conference yesterday, DeNA’s Yuji Shimizu, producer of Blood Brothers, revealed to the audience what makes Blood Brothers so successful.

“The secret to Blood Brothers is special events,” Shimizu says.

Shimizu adds that events have essentially doubled the average revenue per user (ARPU). He equates player participation to more sales.

“Players have to participate in the event in order for you to get sales,” he says. “That’s the secret.”

In the free-to-play social game for iOS and Android, the player is put in the shoes of a warrior turned vampire on a journey for revenge. Players progress through the game by completing quests. Users are tasked with building a five character card deck optimally for battle. Characters gain experience in automated battles in which their skill are activated by chance. Characters can increase in skill level through a fusion mechanic, allowing players to combine characters to make new or stronger characters.

“If you have an event running one week out of the month, a player will get bored,” he says. “This eventually leads to losing players. Also, if you run the same types of events every time, that’s boring too.”

Events in Blood Brothers range from cooperative raid boss battles, special tower dungeons with a different tower for each skill level (beginner, intermediate and advanced), and player versus player (PvP) battles. Shimizu says PvP events are the most popular in the game. Just like in the single player experience, users build a deck with five characters and fight another person’s five-character deck. Players earn event points by participating and also winning during an event. Shimizu described the game of basketball as a metaphor as to how the users earn points to rank higher in events.

“Everyone keeps going for the points until the whistle blows,” Shimizu says.

There’s a few aspects that make events in Blood Brothers successful like running events for just one week (3-4 times per month), different event types (competitive and cooperative), special environments and enemies, limited rare items and rankings and alliances.

Shimizu described five key design points for events in Blood Brothers which were leaderboards, separation into groups, incentivizing effort, one match per day and rewarding effort. First, the game rewards the top echelon of players with special characters and more. For leaderboards, the developers divide users into groups based on skill levels, placing players of a particular skill level in their own leaderboard. The successive wins a player racks up, the more points they receive. Also, players can only play one match per day, and are matched with opponents of the same skill level. Lastly, users are rewarded with a promotion in rank depending on how well they played in a particular event.

Shimizu says Blood Brothers has reached No. 1 on the top grossing Android apps chart in 33 countries, and the game has been downloaded 10 million times to date. Shimizu adds that ARPU has increase every single month since release as well.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Blood Brothers is the No. 3 top grossing app on Android in the U.S. and the No. 39 top grossing app for iPhone.

In celebration of its 10 year anniversary, game company King.com tonight announced that it will be rebranding the company to just King as well as launching two new Saga games for Facebook (one of which will be coming to mobile soon).

As we noted yesterday, everyone at the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is talking about the success of King’s Candy Crush Saga game on mobile and social.

The first new Saga game coming to Facebook is physics-based Papa Pear Saga, which is based off King’s web-based Japanese Pachinko-like title Papa Pear. In the game, players are tasked with making each Papa Pear shot bounce on as many objects as possible before landing in each bucket. The title will be packed with 60 levels at launch as well as with three different game modes and several boosters to help users progress through the game. The game is now on Facebook, but will be “coming soon” to mobile for iOS and Android.

The second game King announced was Farm Heroes Saga, a match-3 game, with an item collecting aspect. Users are tasked with managing multiple components per level, like collection targets, special missions, boss fights, avoiding blockers and more. The game, which is currently in the soft-launch stage, features 70 levels, three game modes and multiple boosters that help users progress further into the game.

King also revealed some data for its games on mobile, social and online. The company says it now sees more than 108 million monthly players (49 million on mobile alone) and 12 billion gameplay sessions a month across its network of games on mobile, social and online.

“We have had lots of fun over the last 10 years making great games and we are honored to have acquired such a loyal fan-base,” said Riccardo Zacconi, co-founder and CEO of King, in a statement. “The exceptional growth of our mobile, Facebook, and cross-platform audience is a testament to the care and craft that goes into our games. We’re pleased to announce two new Saga games on Facebook with Papa Pear Saga and Farm Heroes Saga. These games build upon our Saga portfolio with new concepts that players are sure to enjoy.”

Candy Crush Saga is all the rage at the 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, so much so that we weren’t even able to get into the “Candy Crush Saga postmortem: Luck in the Right Places” session today. The entire development community is interested in learning how Candy Crush Saga became an overnight success on mobile. Unfortunately, we were attending another session, and once we got out of that one, we found ourselves at the back of a line that was hundreds strong. However, at the “Free to Play Game Design: A Year in Review” session, the speakers analyzed trends they saw in the free-to-play space on mobile and social, including the trends they saw from King.com’s Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga.

The most notable trend noted by the speakers was the meteoric rise of King.com’s match-3 puzzler Candy Crush Saga, which skyrocketed up the app store charts since releasing for mobile in November 2012. According to past data from our traffic tracking service AppData, The game has been the No. 1 app on the top grossing Android apps chart for weeks as well as in and out of the top spot on the top grossing iOS apps charts for weeks. Candy Crush Saga also became the No. 1 game on the Facebook DAU chart, the first time since mid-2009 that a Zynga game didn’t hold the top spot.

Steve Meretzky, vice president of game design at Palydom, told the audience to stick with it and don’t give up when trying to reach success as a developer since it took a few “Saga” games before King.com struck gold with Bubble Witch Saga followed by Candy Crush Saga. Although both games feature proven gameplay mechanics seen in other games in the casual space, King.com incrementally innovated the formula enough to reach success, Meretzky says.

Another important factor to Bubble Witch Saga’s and Candy Crush Saga’s success was cross-platform gameplay. King.com kept the game near identical across all platforms, with a similar map screen, leaderboard, UI and more as well as letting the player carry their game progress across all platforms.

“It’s a great customer experience,” says Dave Rohrl, vice president of game production at Goko. “You can experience the game when, where and how you want. This lets players interact with your game a lot more, which ultimately increases their engagement and monetization.”

Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga aren’t the only games pulling off cross-platform gameplay between Facebook and mobile. Casino games like GSN Casino, DoubleDown Casino and Zynga Poker pull off cross-platform gameplay as well as games like Words With Friends.

And there are plenty of games where games on both Facebook and mobile don’t feature cross-platform gameplay like CityVille Hometown and Kingdoms of Camelot (Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North on mobile). Both make the user restart from zero on mobile and Facebook. Rohrl adds that not delivering on cross-platform gameplay is awful, but hopes the feature will become an industry standard in the future.

“This nut will be cracked in the near future, and this will be an absolute baseline for games in the future,” he says.