Playnomics has revealed the brutal truth of free-to-play: the difference between the number of paying and non-paying players in mobile games reaches more than 100 times orders of magnitude. 

Last week, Electronic Arts CFO Blake Jorgensen announced that microtransactions will appear in all upcoming games of the company. Yesterday, this statement was supplemented with new comments.

An article by Ben Holmes, the former director of Playfish and now the main partner at Index Ventures, about the economics of F2P games appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal. 

Journalists from PocketGamer decided to figure out what a paid game can count on in today’s mobile app market. Is there an opportunity to make money not on f2p and not on freemium when it comes to iOS and Android?

Players in various farms have long figured out how not to pay for content that takes a long time to build and accumulate (buildings, number of moves, game resources, etc.). We decided to check how relevant this topic is on iOS today: have they started fighting it, and if so, how. 

The Double Fine studio, which recently released the Iron Brigade action game, now plans to enter the mobile platform market.

It turns out that IAP largely depends on how many applications are installed on the user’s device and, most importantly, which applications are paid or free, analysts from Apsalar found out.  

The high level of fragmentation on Android prevents developers from making money on their own applications, says David Roberts, executive director of PopCap Games. 

Every day there are fewer and fewer companies in the mobile games market that firmly adhere to the paid distribution model. Most of them have either already transferred, or are transferring their projects to the “shareware” type of monetization. However, one of the authors of Ticket to Ride claims that this is nothing more than a fashion that will soon pass. 

According to the latest NPD data, 40% of users, after playing a freemium game, make an in-game payment.

The new strategy of the French company Gameloft works perfectly on mobile platforms: in just 7 days of “rental”, a free game based on a popular cartoon turned out to be in the top five highest-grossing projects in 50 countries around the world. 

Mobile games will have a huge impact on the industry of large console projects in the near future. Ultimately, everything will come to the point that developers of large projects will have to adopt the experience of those who work on mobile applications.