ยป iPhone App Market Study
Check it out:
Random notes:
Average game is used approx 7 minutes per day.
Games have better user value (in terms of entertainment time) than all other apps.
Price cuts work.
I want 30,000 users with clustered publicity bombs.
Using end-of-lifecycle apps (does such a beast exist now?) to drive new sales by converting them to free products beats that advertizing revenue curve.
Generating network effects and community engagement is probably a good idea regardless of ad support (esp. with my curve-beating idea above).
Use Pinch Media if lighter-weight analytics stuff isn’t easy.
It’s interesting to think about 7 minutes as being a design constraint. At the very least, a player needs to get to a save point every 7 minutes. Better would be to have a “satisfying play” in 7 minutes time. I wonder if you look at the most popular iPhone games there’s a trend in what happens around the 7 minute mark?
The only game that anyone has ever tried to virally infect me with is Galcon, and I think it’s significantly faster than 7 minutes.
Jared
25 Feb 09 at 9:34 am
The 7 minutes is totally a design constraint (and on the iPhone saves should be continuous, effectively — it can power off or quit at any time).
There’s also quite a nice Risk clone (name escapes me) that I’ve played for about an hour in a sitting.
I like the Galcon model of multiple games in under 7 minutes. I might get extreme there and go ultra-mini: One minute entertainment. Then you could play 7 games on average, and have seven times as much fun.
Jack
25 Feb 09 at 12:59 pm
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