Low ARPU

Case study

A game had been downloaded more than 5 million times and was highly rated by players. However, such a popular game suddenly decided to terminate its service.

The reason was that the meta-game was not designed well enough to allow players to enjoy the game without having to pay for it.

This meant that sales did not increase in relation to the increase in players, and the development and management team, as well as the infrastructure costs to provide the service, could not be sustained.

Reflection

In this case, the service could have continued if the unit price per player could have been raised, but it is reasonable to consider the termination of the service as the result of a reasonable effort that was not accompanied by results.

Now, let’s look back at why it was not possible to raise the cost per customer.

Meta-game dysfunction

Although there was a meta-game in this game, the function to use the results fostered in the meta-game to take advantage of the main game did not function effectively.

In other words, although there was a meta-game, there was not much point in training in the meta-game.

Then, players could train, so they steadily trained, but there was no motivation to rush to train, and short-time charges were not used.

Targeting too many young people

The game is very popular among young people, with 60% of players under age. In particular, players under the age of 14 accounted for 1/3 of the total. We did not expect young players to pay for the game, which would inevitably result in a low ARPU.

This probably created a bad situation where the number of players increased and infrastructure costs were heavy, but sales did not increase.