The recent launch of Super Mario Run by Nintendo set a new record, with over 40 million downloads during its first four days on the App Store. While these numbers portray a very rosy picture of the mobile gaming industry, it doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.
Over the years, retention has become a tougher challenge for app developers. A few factors are responsible for this. First, the freemium model enables users to download many apps without hurting their pockets. Second, memory and data costs are less of a concern in developed countries today, enabling people to download games without a second thought. Last, the oversaturated app economy provides users with an overwhelming number of options. Data shows that mobile games have been most affected by this.
A recent state of the industry report from Adobe found that mobile games have the highest abandonment rate among all the app categories. On a similar note, a report from app intelligence firm App Annie concluded that games are maturing at a faster pace than ever before, and actually achieve 90 percent of their market potential after 17 weeks.
Since the life cycle of games is growing shorter, the window of opportunity to gain users is also shorter, and even then, users tend to abandon an app quickly. This worrying trend doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon, and initiatives like Google’s Instant Apps are likely to accelerate this by decreasing the friction of switching between apps.
What is driving this change?
In order to understand this shift, we have to dive deeper into how digital content is being consumed. Multiple research studies have shown that the attention spans of millennials and Gen Z-ers (people born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s) are much shorter than those of previous generations. Therefore, the timeframe in which users “test” new content to decide if they like it is also shorter than ever before. As the chart below makes clear, when it comes to games, the abandonment rate is highest among young people.
