Joe Jasko

A new study this week from specialty research firm EEDAR has revealed an insightful connection between how much a person is active in an online mobile game community, and how much they actually end up spending in the game itself. The study also comes hot on the heels of a recent poll conducted by Applifier, which revealed that the highest sources of discovery for a mobile game include reading a user review, hearing about it from a friend or family member, and seeing a friend or family member playing the game.In essence, EEDAR's study of 3,000 people who refer to themselves as mobile and tablet gamers has shown a direct correlation between gamers who spend more (referred to as "whales" in the findings) and gamers who share more: that these two gaming habits have simply become one and the same in the mobile games space. In every single category of sharing that was examined for the study, EEDAR found that the heavy-spending mobile gamer's tendencies to share about a game were at a significantly larger margin than other casual players and non-spenders.For instance, a whopping 94% of big spenders were likely to tell their friends about a game verbally, as compared to the 65% of low-spending players. Conversely, 91% of big spenders were prone to show their friends gameplay footage, over the 42% of more casual spenders. Other categories of sharing included giving a star rating in a storefront, writing a review on a storefront, and discussing the game online via various forums: each of which brought in a high showing of 76% and above for these "whale" gamers.