Case Study - PlayOn Arcade

Double Trump has conducted a study resulting in very strong support to the validity of Micro Licensing model, a careful A-B testing approach was taken towards a fully functional casual games site. Double Trump has signed distribution agreements with over 20 game publishers and populated a games portal with over a hundred games. The traffic to that site was randomly split between two very similar copies of the site – the first, offering a standard Try Before You Buy business model, where gamers could try any game for one hour of free play time, and then had to choose whether to buy the game for $19.99. The second copy had, on top of the Try-Before-You-Buy option, an option to register to the PlayOn model and play any game for as long as the user wanted for one cent a minute, up to $19.99 per title.

The results were very clear – the conversion rate to action in the PlayOn site rose 1.6 times compared to the standard site, where half of the actions were purchases and the other half were registrations to PlayOn. Illustrated in numbers, if a standard casual games site would have 1% conversion between download and purchase, the PlayOn site would have 0.8% conversion to purchase plus 0.8% conversion to PlayOn registration.

Even more important were the findings about the Average Revenues Per User (ARPU). While an annual value of a person purchasing a game is around $35-40 the average spending of a gamer registering to PlayOn was $105! This means that not only does the PlayOn model raise the conversion rate; it raises it with registrations to a model that makes people spend three times as much per year.

Going back to numbers, if in a standard site, 1000 downloads would lead to 10 purchases which would lead to an annual worth of $350 (ten times $35), a PlayOn site would turn the same 1000 downloads to eight purchases and eight PlayOn registrations, which would lead to an annual spending of $1120 (eight times $35 plus eight times $105). This is 220% raise on revenues.