What is ARPDAU and why is it Important

What you'll learn

Defining and Calculating ARPDAU

Factors Affecting ARPDAU Value

The Influence of Game Type, Age, and Production

Expected ARPDAU Values Based on Game Maturity

Have you heard the acronym ARPDAU being passed around?  it’s a rather critical one to measure the true success of your game.  Let’s dive in to learn what it is and why it is important.

What is ARPDAU?

ARPDAU stands for Average Revenue Per Daily Active User.

This is a very different statistic than total revenue, gross profit or even a measure of your total number of players.  Rather ARPDAU gives an appropriate value of each player within your economy.  It is achieved by taking a DAU measurement and creating a total sum of revenue collected during that period.  Divide the total sum of revenue by the DAU.  You now have your average revenue per daily active user.

What contributes to a good ARPDAU value?

This question varies greatly by a lot of factors - the most critical of all being the type of game that you have created.  Passive games, such as puzzlers or invest and express games that build off of a free to play model often see ARPDAU values that are low.  Niche games such as casino style and first person shooters will often see ARPDAU values that are much higher.

You may be asking — why would anyone go after low value ARPDAU games.  Well - keep in mind that this is an average per daily user — not a representation of total profit.  Casino games may have a much higher ARPDAU value than passive games, but passive games can easily see a total user base that is significantly higher.  Often times the volume of users is so much greater that a well crafted puzzler can make more money than a casino game.

Game Age

The age of a game is also very important in the ARPDAU calculation.  When a game is newly launched, ARPDAU is often lower.  This is because the game has not yet had time to be tuned and adjusted to better suit the players needs.

As interactions with certain features are evaluated, they are often adjusted, removed or enhanced to improve gameplay.  These changes increase your games ARPDAU over time.

Production Value

The production value of a game also influences its ARPDAU in a significant manner.  Let’s be honest - if your game has really bad art assets or horrible user flows, you will not retain your users.  The users that do stay will be less likely to invest their hard earned money into your game.

When your game has a finely tuned UI, high quality graphics and unique characteristics that bring value to the game, your users will be more likely to spend money.  Your production quality greatly influences your ARPDAU.

Ok - so what is a good ARPDAU value then?

Well - let’s assume that we have a newly launched passive game, lower quality art and maybe a decent amount of bugs or issues.  An app in this state may only see a few cents as their ARPDAU value.  They have a lot of tuning and improvements that can be done and will see their value go up over time.

Now let’s compare this to an app that has been out for more than 6 months.  They have had time to invest in high quality art assets, fine tune the UI flows and generally have received feedback from users on what works and what does not.  A game in this state can easily see values of $0.30 ARPDAU or higher depending on the size of the team supporting the app.