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Mobile developer Perblue has revealed staggering financial figures for their free-to-play MMO Parallel Kingdom, also declaring that Android is currently outpacing iOS in nearly every way.
Perblue’s CEO Justin Beck spoke at GDC Europe on how his Madison studio of nine staff members started with just $20,000 in savings. In just four years the company has released and efficiently managed their titles to a point where they’re now generating $3m a year with 35 employees.
The figure is impressive, but how Perblue reaches the figure may come as a surprise.
Their longest running title Parallel Kingdoms has 1.5m registered accounts, but only 15,000 daily active users, and 50,000 monthly active users which Beck himself admits isn’t that sizable.
That said, those users represent $0.40 – $.050 per user, per day. That works out to over $200,000 a month from microtransactions on just one of their games.
Beck went on to talk about how he believes Android may already be in the process of surpassing iOS. 85 per cent of PerBlue’s players are Android users, and Beck sees Android’s multiple carries and dozens of devices as a huge strength against Apple’s smaller pool of choices.
Beck also pointed out that mobile carriers earn a higher margin on Android devices and have begun preferring Android over iOS in store advertisements.
"iPhone makes a little bit more money at a quicker pace, but Android actually has more users over a longer period of time," Beck told Joystiq; adding that while Apple is ‘an amazing business’ it won’t be able to keep pace with the ‘freight train’ that is Android.
