Idle games can be hightly profitable for devs. Their simple designs and mechanics are quick and cheap to create. And there are a lot of monetization options including IAPs, ads, and subscription.
If you are making or publishing an idle game, here’s a bunch of engagement metrics from GameAnalytics that’ll help you understand how your game is doing.
- Players of idle games show a stickiness (DAU/MAU*100%) of 18% vs 10.5% for hyper-casual titles.
- Idle gamers play more sessions each day – 5.3 compared to 4.6 for hyper-casual. They also have a longer average session length (eight minutes) than hyper-casual.
- The average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) for idle games is nine times more than hyper-casual.
Additionally, the study provides the following metrics describing the performance of top games in the genre:
- D1 retention: top 10% = 45.55%;
- D1 retention: top 25% = 39.40%;
- Playtime: top 10% = 34.92m;
- Playtime: top 25% = 21.0m;
- Session count: top 10% = 5.82;
- Session count: top 25% = 5.03;
- Average session length: top 10% = 7m;
- Average session length: top 25% = 6m.
The playtime of idlers, according to GameAnalytics, is quite high relative to other mobile genres. So this is an important metric to check when you’re analyzing an idle game’s performance.