Freemium games worth $10 million per day within four years, says mobile dev

Speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Boss Alien founder Jason Avent predicted western free-to-play games will be raking in ridiculous amounts of money within just a few years.

"I think that, in the next three or four years, one game could make $10 million a day," he said, as reported by GamesIndustry.

"I remember when we were working on the ATV Fury franchise at Climax, and I remember Shuhei [Yoshida, SCEE] said it was a $100 million business. It was quite important. But when you're making $10 million a day, that's less than a fortnight."

Avent pointed out that the top-grossing games on the App Store are nearly all freemium titles like Clash of Clans and Puzzle & Dragons; the latter famously pulls in close to $4 million per day in Japan.

"How long was Clash of Clans at number one for, and now it's at number two? It's months and months. Imagine getting $10 million a day for months and months," he said.

"That's a huge, huge industry, and bigger than any other video game ever."

Avent said the Japanese market supported freemium mobile games many years before the west, largely due to the popularity of featurephones, which took hold well before smartphones. He said at moment, the average revenue per user in Japan is three times higher than in the west - but predicted this will change as western markets are "educated" in free-to-play.

Alien Boss is responsible for CSR Racing; in Avent's full talk, he acknowledged that the mobile racing effort didn't show "patience" in how it first tried to monetise users.