The VKontakte social network shared its gaming DAU and MAU, and also told which genres are most popular on the platform.
On October 12, the first VKontakte conference for developers, VK High Score, was held in Moscow. It was opened by a report by Maxim Babichev, the head of the social network gaming platform.
Maxim divided the performance into three parts.
1. Numbers and demographics
The metrics and demographics of the social network were at the center of the first part of the speech.
The main pride of VKontakte is its MAU. The monthly audience of the project is 97 million. And, according to SimilarWeb, the Russian social network is in the Top 5 sites by traffic in the world.
* — according to SimilarWeb
But another fact turned out to be much more interesting.
Historically, VKontakte has been called a platform whose core consists of young people. As it turned out, this does not correspond to the real state of affairs.
“The backbone of the current audience of the social network is women from 18 to 40 years old,” Babichev said.
The largest demographic group of VKontakte on the desktop is even older – women from 45 to 64 years old.
Source: Mediascope, March 2017, Russia, Desktop only, million people
Despite the fact that “the entire VKontakte web audience launches games at least once a year,” the active gaming audience is much smaller.
The gaming MAU of the social network on the desktop is 21 million.
This is almost a quarter of all users who log in to VKontakte from a PC per month.
If we talk about the portrait of the gaming audience, there are also some surprises here.
On the desktop, most of all games on the platform are played not by teenagers, but by people from 25 to 34 years old.
The smallest number of players among the audience over 35 years old. The least of them are among women over 45 years old (here it is quite possible to conclude that developers ignore this audience).
Statistics as of October 1, 2017, web only, million people
The mobile audience of VKontakte is not very large.
However, it is necessary to judge this only by the gaming DAU and MAU networks on Android: 0.8 million and 12 million, respectively.
The gaming audience of VKontakte on mobile and desktop is different. In mobile, the most active gaming audience has not yet turned 18. These are not conditional young specialists, as in the web.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017, Android only, million people2. The most popular and most profitable genres
Maxim devoted the second part of the report to what is played and what is paid for in games in VKontakte.
Neither role-playing games popular on mobile, nor social casinos popular on Facebook in terms of installations in VKontakte are in demand at all.
The most popular genre (the leader in the number of installations) on VKontakte is puzzles. By a large margin, shooters are in the second position in popularity.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017
The audience of puzzles and shooters on VKontakte is mostly young.
36% of puzzle players have yet to come of age. There are even more of them among shooters – 57%.
Moreover, it is the male audience of pre-conscription age that feels a special love for the genre.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017
The fact that most of the players are teenagers is not a feature of the described genres.
This is a feature of the social network.
Most of the game downloads on VKontakte account for young people.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017, million installations
The same situation, for example, with adventures and simulators.
In both cases, most of the installations are for the younger generation.
The second most active group is older than 25, but younger than 34 years.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017
The situation with payments looks completely different.
Firstly, the number of installations and the earnings of genres do not correlate with each other at all. For example, there are no shooters even in the box office Top 5 genres, and puzzles, although in second place, but seriously lag behind adventures at the box office.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017
Secondly, all segments of the audience bring significant profit to the platform.
Both teenagers and women pay for 45.
The most paying for VKontakte are guys 17 years old and younger, as well as men from 25 to 34 years old.
Statistics as of October 1, 2017
At the same time, only 3% of players pay on average on the platform.
The average income from a paying player in VKontakte is 67 votes (or 469 rubles for the platform or 237 rubles for the developer).
The slide a little higher can be taken as a benchmark,” Maxim noted at the presentation.
In other words, if you have less than 3% of users paying, the average check falls short of 18 votes, and ARPU and ARPPU are up to 2.3 and 67 votes, respectively, then it’s definitely time for you to think about changes in the game.
By the way, the greatest activity of players falls on the interval between 18 and 21 hours.
This is true for both PC and mobile.
Statistics for October 5, 2017, thousand people
Maxim also shared the results of the launch of the HTML5 platform Direct Games.
Since its launch this summer, 19 games have been released on it. Every day, each of them is launched from 1 to 7 thousand times. The average session length on the platform is 8 minutes.
3. Innovations
I will give them a list, we will talk about some of them separately in future publications.:
- the official announcement of the gaming desktop application took place (if you have any questions on this topic, write in the comments, we will try to ask Maxim);
- subscriptions are being introduced, which today VKontakte insistently asks to be introduced into games (they make up 10-35% of the revenue of games);
- the possibility of integrating the application widget on web pages has been announced;
- announced the introduction of snippets to links to applications;
- a redesign of the installation window has been announced;
- told about the introduction of a rewarding video.
The presentation with the original slides can be downloaded from this link.
Photo: VK