During the past months, our trainee Matthias analyzed the virtual goods market, especially in the area of social gaming, social networks and virtual worlds. Today, SnipClip announced at the GamesBeat conference, where Oliver will pitch for SnipClip at the Who’s Got Game competition, that it will publish the results. The press release highlights some interesting insights:
Average revenue per monthly active user per year:
- non-gaming social apps: $0.37
- social games: $3.65
- virtual worlds: $8.04
Market potential for 2008:
- non-gaming social apps: $215 millions
- social games: $340 millions
- virtual worlds: $244 millions
On my search for more figures from virtual items sales in social networks or virtual worlds I got in contact with Vili Lehdonvirta from virtual-economy.org. I am so happy, that he and his colleague Juho Hamari started an own forum-thread on virtual-economy.org, where everybody can share revenue data and other metrics of virtual asset sales market.
This is a really good start and I hope, this can be a central point of metrics of the virtual asset sales market.
Good bye and stay tuned.
We already blogged about the size of the virtual goods market. There are no real numbers, but different estimations. Here’s another one from a scientific institute:
Many people of a certain age may consider such gifts a waste of their hard-earned and very real money. But not so a growing number of tweens and teens as well as 20- and even some 30-somethings, who spent around $2.1 billion in 2006 on virtual goods and services, according to researchers at Finland’s Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).
Via For the Holidays: Good Things Come in Virtual Packages: Scientific American
An interesting way to calculate the market size of virtual goods describes James McGough in his (quite interesting) blog. Here is the formula:
Virtual goods market = Potential users x Yearly user spend x Penetration
Read the full article at Virtual goods market size « Executive Summary
In numbers:
In the future:
Of course, these numbers aren’t exact, but just an estimation or predictions.
To sum it up: games will stay the most popular cultural product on the Internet. So have a good time.
