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Milestone

Milestone

Last week, our Windows Phone games passed a quarter-million downloads!

windows phone totals
With this milestone and a few months of availability for the iOS, Android, and Kindle versions of Voyager: Grand Tour, I figured it was time to take a look at how these platforms compared.

First, let’s take a look at Windows Phone. Where do those 250k downloads come from, and how does that compare to, say, last month’s (October 2013) ad revenue?

windows phone numbers
Voyager is responsible for approximately 2/3 of our Windows Phone downloads, with Rare Earth making up the bulk of the rest. In terms of ad revenue, things are stacked even more heavily toward Voyager. This is likely because Rare Earth’s ads are only shown in that game’s pause menu, while Voyager’s are displayed during gameplay.

Next, let’s look at just Voyager across platforms.

all numbers
This is interesting! The Windows Phone version of Voyager has almost 9x as many downloads as every version of Voyager: Grand Tour (iOS, Android, and Kindle) combined. Android is about 2x iOS, and Kindle is a rounding error.

But if we look at the same one-month snapshot of ad revenue, things change dramatically. Windows Phone makes up less than a quarter of the total, and Android is responsible for well over half.

Note: Kindle is not broken out separately, because both the Android and Kindle versions use AdMob as their ad provider. However, Kindle’s numbers are so low that it’s not worth differentiating which platform is responsible for which ad impressions.

To get a better look at the overall picture, here’s a chart with everything included.

voyager numbers
This really puts into perspective download numbers vs. revenue. The raw numbers are crazy: the best-performing version of Voyager: Grand Tour is barely ahead of the low-performing BuildDown. Windows Phone games make up a staggering 93% of all installs. And yet, they were responsible for barely a quarter of the total ad revenue last month. Android dominated with more than 50%, and even with a lowly 2.5% of the total install pie, iOS managed a respectable 17% of revenue.

None of these numbers take into account in-app purchases, which were not available on the Windows Phone platform at the time of the first Voyager’s release, so I don’t know how that platform would stack up against others in terms of direct payments. But my experience is that, even though it was easier to reach a wide audience on Windows Phone, Android (and to a lesser extent, iOS) offer a significantly better return on investment for ad-supported games.