According to Kirill Petrov, Managing Director of i-Free, in 2011 Russian developers creating applications for iOS and Android platforms will receive more than $ 80 million. Most of this money will be earned outside of Russia, one of the main reasons is that payment by bank cards is still poorly developed in our country.
Alice Chumachenko, the founder of Game Insight, also considers the announced figures to be fair. “This is not a very big figure, we have earned about $40 million,” she told Vedomosti. Grigory Lipich, CEO of ABBYY Russia, also agreed with the assessment of i-Free. He says that sales of ABBYY apps in the App Store started a year ago, and in Android — just a few months ago, so sales through the Android Market so far bring half as much.
Mikhail Lyalin, chairman of the Board of Directors of Zeptolab (developed a popular game for smartphones and tablets Cut the Rope), called the assessment from i-Free conservative. According to him, the Russian market accounts for only 5-7% of Zeptolab’s revenues.
According to Petrov, the turnover of the Russian App Store this year will not exceed $ 7 million. This is due to the fact that there are relatively few iOS-based devices in our country. In addition, payment by bank cards is not very developed, he adds. Kirill Petrov found it difficult to determine the sales of the Android Market store in Russia — most of the applications in it are free, developers earn money from advertising, the sales of which are difficult to estimate.
But SMS payments are developed in Russia. For one of its games sold through alternative Android Market app stores, i-Free introduced the possibility of payment via SMS. As a result, its sales immediately increased 10 times. Now it is important for Russian developers to master the international market, which already has many success stories. According to Petrov, i-Free has invested $4 million in the development of games and applications for iOS and Android over the past two years, and in 2011 she will earn $3 million.
Russian developers have now occupied the list of leaders in Android Market downloads. According to sales, the PowerAMP audio player from Maxim Petrov and the Cut the Rope game from Zeptolab are in the first position in it. According to the number of downloads of free and paid versions in the Android Market, games from Game Insight are in the second and third positions, and the same PowerAMP is in the fourth. According to the online store, PowerAMP was purchased by 0.5-1 million people worldwide at a price of $5 per copy – i.e. they spent $2.5—5 million. Earlier, Maxim Petrov told Vedomosti that he gets half of the sales, and therefore he could earn $1.25-2.5 million in the Android Market.
So far, the revenues of developers and publishers from the sale of applications through the App Store and Android Market are incomparable with the sales of mobile content through the networks of mobile operators. According to i-Free, the volume of mobile content sales in Russia in 2011 will amount to $1.3 billion.
Source of the Statement