A couple days ago while on an excruciatingly painful internet-less commute I resorted to purging my phone of unused and old apps to keep myself entertained. It was a nostalgic trip for sure going through old and forgotten games played just once once or twice since being on my phone for what was probably months (I’m looking at you Color Switch) but it really got me thinking, What is the average shelf life of a game in terms of downloaded to uninstalled?
For most people like me I would imagine that until going on a massive game purge or running out of memory the downloaded games just sit collecting dust until eventually one day the latter happens. Assuming that on average games are 100 mb and you’ve got a nice big 32 gb model phone downloading at a rate of 2 games a week. In about a little over 3 years you’ll run out of room for the first time and do a mandatory purge, so the first game that you downloaded would technically live on your phone for over 3 years without having any attention paid to it.
On the off-case you’re the type of person that uninstalls a game as soon as they don’t play it anymore I would give the game a generous estimate of a week until it’s sent off into the abyss.
Averaging these two for a general estimate (that’s heavily skewed) for roughly a year and a half is a pretty good number to arrive to. So with this I guess the best takeaway for an app developer is within that year and a half (a week to 3 years) after your first impression find opportunities to get players interested again.
That’s it for this time, go out and give some of your old games some attention! m(_ _)m
-Kelvin