I definitely like your thought on a second tipping point and will try to look at that some more; been putting something together for next week to look at how to measure the impact of feature releases in terms of the Sticky Factor.

I don’t know that you can really tie DAU or MAU to monetization – that’s a huge leap as there are a lot of variables. For example, I have heard that Game A may be more engaging than Game B, but Game B is where more of the money is being made. A lot of that ties to the way the game was designed to monetize the value points for the player. Hence I think you may find that game genres (like Mafia War-type games) have similar triggers and thus could have comparable revenue rates.

Regarding the $25K per day per 1 million active users per day, that was suggested by Sean Ryan of Loki Partners (see http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/10/01/calcuating-how-playdom-is-making-50m-from-28m-users/#comments) and I don’t have further details; I did have someone who knows the revenues around one of the top 20 games on Facebook use that metric and noted that it was close to what they saw, so it may have validity. But as noted before, I think this varies among games and across platforms (Zynga and Playfish have revenue and users on MySpace and Hi5 as well).

Eric

Extremely interesting metrics, Eric. I’ve been digging into this a bit too with the wealth of data we have for FB games. For example, looking at the top 25 FB game providers (as of 10/22), there’s an average 25% DAU/MAU ratio — and eyeballing the histogram, there appear to be two tipping points or discontinuities, one around 15% as you note, and another around 30%. I suspect but don’t have hard data to show that monetization may accelerate above 30% as well due to increased network effects.

The real question in all this of course is how to relate DAU (or MAU) to monetization. In the F2P MMOG space, several providers have offered data showing that they have an ARPU (not ARPPU) of about $1.20-$1.40 per MAU per month — which is *far* higher than the vague figures I’ve seen for FB, which seems to be at around 25c-50c per MAU. But it’s hard to say.

Eric, in an earlier post you said that most games appeared to be trying to get to $25K per 1M DAU per day (which, at a 25% Stickiness ratio, works out to a MAU ARPU of $0.19 – seemingly very low).

Can you say more about where the $25K/1M DAU comes from? It would seem to be low given rumored-but-believable revenue figures for Zynga and Playfish — and as I said, very low compared to the web-based MMOGs (which if nothing else may mean we have better numbers to look forward to as designs mature).