Juniper Research forecasts that revenues from in-game purchases will overtake the traditional pay-per-download model as the primary source of monetising mobile games by 2013, fulled by Apple’s in-app billing mechanism. The analyst firm claims that total end-user revenues will surpass US$11 billion annually by 2015, nearly double what they were in 2009 (US$6 billion). 

However the report does warn developers of the challenge of ‘discoverability’: “Discoverability can be a ‘chicken and egg’ problem,” said report author Daniel Ashdown. “High downloads lead to prominence, but achieving a high number of downloads is largely dependent on already being prominent. Consequently, a small minority of games achieve very high downloads, whilst the vast majority achieve very small download figures.”