What goes up must come down, and the saying could not be truer for flash-in-the-pan mobile game, Draw Something, which has lost millions of monthly active users after being bought by game developer Zynga.
The Pictionary-esque game, which became the fastest growing original mobile game of all time (surpassing 50 million downloads in less than two months), is on a steep decline - reportedly losing over three million active users in the past month alone.
Data from independent traffic tracker, AppData, shows the mobile application has lost 700 000 daily active users in the past seven days, and one million monthly active users over the same period. Current estimates place monthly active users at 35 million and total daily active users at 10.2 million.
AppData is a division of research firm Inside Facebook, and uses Facebook's active user formula to derive its statistics. According to AppData, Draw Something's daily active users peaked at 14.6 million on 3 April, and have been declining since.
Draw Something was released in February by OMGPOP - an original game developer that was then acquired by Zynga in March for an estimated $200 million. When Draw Something was at its peak, Zynga said: "We believe it's not only the fastest-growing original mobile game of all time - 50 days to hit 50 million downloads - but one of the fastest growing Web sensations that we've seen."
Apps and downs
According to reports, investors have noticed that Zynga's purchase of OMGPOP is not paying off. Draw Something appears to be failing at sustaining its popularity in the way other games like Angry Birds have. Forbes reports that the popularity of the game peaked on the day OMGPOP was bought by Zynga.
Zynga recently reported profit of $321 million for the first quarter, marking a 32% year-on-year gain. However, it has been widely noted that the company's stock price has declined by almost 50% since March.
Recently, App Promo's First Annual Developer Survey showed it is becoming increasingly difficult for developers to get their applications discovered and downloaded by users as the market is continually flooded with new offerings.
The survey showed that on average close to 60% of all applications do not generate enough revenue to break even on development costs. A further 68% of respondents earned $5 000 or less with their most successful application - with only 12% of developers earning $50 000 or more - those top earners have an average of $30 000 as a marketing budget though.
A substantial 80% of respondents said they could not generate enough revenue for a standalone business.
Share