Monetizing Google Play: free games with access to operator billing

Google Play has an undeserved reputation as a platform that does not make money - however, at least a number of free game developers are against it. TinyCo, Spry Fox and Robot Invader claim that the profit from Android is comparable and sometimes exceeds the profit from iOS devices.

The difficulties of making money on Google Play are widely known and discussed. According to Distimo and Flurry, Google Play earns 1/8 of the Apple iTunes App Store profit and its average revenue per user (ARPU, average revenue per user) is only 23% of the revenue from an iOS user. However, since the Distimo and Flurry reports are based on very large averaging, not all developers agree with them.

The head of Spry Fox, David Edery, recently tweeted the company's earnings on Android. According to Edery, for every dollar earned by the popular game Triple Town in iOS, there are 67 cents in Android. He also noted that this is not a question of a much larger, but less profitable user base for Android - the number of users for iOS and Android versions of Triple Town is almost the same as the conversion rate. Although the game shows more ARPU in iTunes than on Google Play, Edery still believes in the future of the Google platform, calling Google Play "a very good source of profit."
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Major developers also find many paying users on Google Play. Andressen Horowitz of TinyCo last week published similar data - for every dollar that Tiny Village earns on iOS, it’s 65 cents on Android. If excluding tablets, this figure rises to 82 cents per dollar. Thus, TinyCo's earning options are very close to Spry Fox's, not Flurry data.

Glu Mobile is another company that speaks of more than analysts' earnings. Although only 30% of Glu's free-to-play profits in Q4 came from Android smartphones, both platforms show roughly equal ARPU, said Adam Flanders, vice president of sales and marketing for the company. Glu also sees that the conversion of users to Android is constantly improving, for which Google Play is due to the wider adaptation of purchases through credit cards in the store and the expansion of Google Check Out to international telecom operators.

Access to operators billing is an extremely important tool for Android developers with free games, as it allows a user without a credit card to make purchases of digital goods, thereby increasing the conversion of users from free to paid and monetization. Operator billing is one of the key reasons why DeNA companies can get a conversion rate of 15% in Japan versus 2% in North America. The lucrative South Korean market is also the result of carrier billing - Com2uS turns approximately 10% of Android users into paying in South Korea, and only 3% in the United States.

Robot Invader’s Wind-Up Knight game gets 60% of its revenue from Google Play, thanks in large part to operator accounts, says co-founder Chris Pruet. Wind-Up Knight players are almost twice as often converted to paid on Android than on iOS, and when they turn, they show better ARPU than on iOS, also thanks to carrier billing.

“Android actually has a number of unique features that make it quite profitable,” he explains. “One of the main functions is integration with billing systems of operators all over the world. In some regions (particularly in Japan and some European countries), no one buys anything on the phone using credit cards - everyone wants their purchases to be debited from their mobile account and shown on the statement at the end of the month. ”

In general, the history of large and small developers say that you can make money on Google Play. But the most successful companies make free-to-play applications that connect to the billing of international operators.