Is There Any Good To Come From Incentivized Installs?

September 7 2011, 5:43pm

A recent study from W3i suggests that games that gain downloads through participating in incentivized programs (basically advertising to be downloaded in exchange for some other incentive – usually in game currency or unlockable items in other games) can actually attract more reliable users then previously believed. According to their report, some games showed users gained through this process actually had better 30-day retention rates than users gained organically, which goes directly against the conventional wisdom in the mobile market community. The data is certainly interesting, but TechCrunch points out that the report is not above being suspect, owing entirely to the fact that prior to Apple’s lockdown on incentivized programs, W3i (the report’s creator) was in the incentivized download business. Sarah Perez writes: “Unfortunately, while this (far too narrow) slice of data does seem to show that incentivized installs aren’t necessarily the monster that Apple makes them out to be in all cases, the source of this data is suspect. It would be interesting to see a broader study from a less-biased company.” What do you think? Have you ever signed on for an incentivized program? Did it generate the downloads you wanted? Source: Tech Crunch