Distimo: Revenue data from Apple and Google Play app stores in April 2013

Distimo recently reported that in November 2012, Google Play accounted for only 19% of the total revenue of the two major application stores, Google Play and App Store, but in April 2013, its proportion reached 27%, an increase of 8 percentage points.

One developer worth mentioning is Mobage, which had roughly the same revenue in both Apple and Google Play stores in April, and is highly profitable not only in Asia but also in the U.S. Mobage generated more than $5.1 million in revenue in April (48%), with $5.6 million in revenue on the Apple App Store (52%).

Gameloft's free game "World of Arms" had considerable revenue on Google Play in the UK, Germany, Spain, Finland, India, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Israel, Ireland and Hong Kong in April this year.

Square Enix's Final Fantasy III generated 73% of the game's revenue in April, but the game has only made $130,000 in total revenue to date (note: the game costs $15.99, which may explain its relatively low total revenue).

The report shows that Apple App Store is still the most profitable app store, especially in the US market. In April 2013, the daily revenue of the top 200 apps on Google Play's revenue list was $1.1 million, while the daily revenue of the top 200 apps on Apple's App Store (including iPhone and iPad platforms) was $5.1 million, 4.6 times more than Google Play. Distimo also found that most of the apps on these two lists are free apps that use the IAP model.

The report states that this occurs when:

1) Many US app developers still develop content only for the iOS platform. Even if they publish apps to both app stores, the revenue of their apps on Apple's iOS version is significantly higher. King's game "Candy Crush Saga" and EA's game "The Simpsons: Tapped Out" are typical examples. The latter earned $4.8 million in the United States in April, of which 79% came from the Apple App Store.

2) DSLweb.de recently reported that the number of mobile phone users in Germany fell by 471,000 in the first quarter of 2013 to the current 112.7 million.

Despite the decline in the number of mobile phone users, Deutsche Telekom's mobile users increased by 437,000 to more than 37 million, E-Plus Group's mobile users increased by 547,000, and Telefonica O2 also added 25,000 users. During the same period, Vodafone's mobile users in Germany decreased by 1.48 million to 32.4 million.

3) IDC's recent report predicts that global tablet shipments will grow 58.7% year-on-year in 2013, from 144.5 million to 229.3 million units. Tablet shipments may exceed notebook computers this year, and surpass the sum of all PCs and notebook computers in 2015.

The global average selling price of tablets is expected to drop 10.8% this year to $381, but the average selling price of PCs will still be about twice that of tablets ($635).

4) According to Venturebeat, Blizzard's undisclosed MMO project (codenamed Titan) has recently been reported to reduce the development team. News about the Titan project first surfaced in 2011, when Blizzard COO Paul Sams said the company had assigned a "dream team" to develop the project, and the team members had participated in the production of World of Warcraft.

It is reported that the game's "dream team" once included 100 developers, but has now been reduced to 30 people. In addition, the release date of the Titan project has been delayed from the end of 2014 to 2016. Blizzard said this move is part of the company's "iterative" development process, but did not disclose the specific completion date of the project.

via:GameBang