Subscribing by Yourself

Another interesting datum is the amount of revenue JAMDAT derives from subscriptions. This is particularly interesting because single-player, non-networked, unconnected (expect perhaps for high score upload) games are the vast majority of JAMDAT’s revenue.

During the year ended December 31, 2003 and the three months ended March 31, 2004, we derived approximately 32% and 30% of our revenues, respectively, from subscriptions.

Interesting numbers! What are people subscribing to? The answer is: They are subscribing to single-player games. A stunning oddity! People are paying monthly for a game they downloaded once, and can keep forever, and, in most cases, no substantial service is rendered to them after they download the game.

Moreover, the percentage of users choosing to subscribe is larger than it looks: Almost all of that 30% of subscription revenue is probably coming from Verizon and other smaller CDMA/BREW network operators because of the ease of subscription charging in Qualcomm’s BREW mobile commerce system.

Mobile game customers will pay by subscription, even when they can buy the game outright and no further services are provided. There is little or no barrier, then, for a provider of mobile connected games to get customers to pay by the month for the ongoing service provided in both simple multiplayer and persistent-world games.