Virtual Goods News

Today the prominent iPhone developer Freeverse announced that in-app transactions are counted by Apple when the company determines which games rank on the App Store's Top-Grossing Apps Chart. This fact could be very important to the survival of free iPhone games that choose to monetize through in-app transaction sales of virtual goods and other digital content. 

Freeverse's assertion is based on its own internal data regarding its iPhone games and their relative positioning on various App Store charts. Freeverse's Flick Fishing game for iPhone contains in-app transactions while its Top Gun game does not. On the Top 100 U.S. Paid Apps list, Top Gun ranks #60 while Flick Fishing ranks #72. On the Top Grossing 100 Apps list, the two games's positions are inverted: Flick Fishing is #97 while Top Gun is #100. 

This inversion is only possible if Apple is counting purchases of Flick Fishing's $.99 in-app transactions toward the game's total gross. Otherwise, games ranking higher on the Top Paid Apps list are selling better and therefore should be generating more revenue. 

For free apps that generate all of their revenue through in-app transactions, the ability to race up the Top Grossing Apps chart as well as the more volatile Free Apps chart could grant much-needed visibility to games like MMORPGs that need long lifespans to be profitable. To date, no free app that features paid in-app transactions has appeared on the Top Grossing chart, but only one such app is currently available in the App Store (a free version of ngmoco's Rolando 2).