In its latest report, Juniper Research explores the mobile gaming space. What they’ve found is interesting – by 2013, revenues from in-game purchases will overtake the traditional pay-per-download model as the primary source of monetizing mobile games.
As you all know, Apple already enables in-app billing mechanism which works like a charm and that system will most likely be copied by other players — all of which will drive the total end-user revenues to surpass $11 billion annually by 2015, which is nearly double of what they [revenues] were in 2009 ($6 billion). In that sense, you may have noticed that the number of free to download games is growing, with developers and publishers fighting for the consumers’ wallets at a later point, offering upgrades and virtual items for purchase.
However, Juniper also points out that discoverability remains a problem for developers and publishers, given that Apple’s App Store and Android Market now contain 100,000s of applications, the majority of which are mobile games…
And you can get additional information about the report titled “Mobile Games: App Store Strategies, Business Models & Forecasts 2010-2015” from Juniper’s website.