Key Factors of In-App Purchase for Game Applications

In game market, mobile applications (App) will reach to 20% revenue. Related researchers also pointed out that game Apps are the largest source of revenue compared to other Apps. In order to attract more customers to use, App developers made a number of ways, for example, free or trial Apps, prepayment which can obtain more services, providing complete free App but customers need to do in-App purchases if they have advanced needs, or click on the ads to get extra content and services. Game Apps developers need to design products to satisfy customers´ demands and attract more mobile device users to download, and consumption within the App. Recent surveys reported that in-App purchases will be the major trend. Therefore, game App manufacturers need to know which factor is crucial for increasing in-App purchase behaviors. Therefore, this study attempts to define potential factor set of game Apps and then use back-propagation neural network (BPN) based feature selection method to identify crucial important factors of influencing in-app purchases for game App users. The extracted factors can help game developers to improve their design for increasing the revenue.