Who actually pays for a free game?
Ask most people how a free game on their phone pays its bills and they will give one of two answers. Lots of players each spend a little, a dollar here and there. Or the ads cover it. Both answers sound sensible. Neither describes where most of the money comes from.
In February 2016 the analytics company Swrve measured the purchases of tens of millions of players in the free-to-play games that use its tools. Only 1.9 percent of players bought anything with real money that month. The other 98 in every 100 played for free.
The money was even more lopsided than the players. The top tenth of those payers, about 0.19 percent of all players, brought in 48 percent of the money spent on in-game purchases. Put another way, in a game with 10,000 players, about 190 pay something in a month, and about 19 of them bring in almost half of the purchase revenue. That is half of the purchase money, not half of everything the game earns, because ad money is not counted.
Most players who pay buy just once a month
The few who pay are not a steady crowd either. In the same 2016 sample, 64 percent of paying players made a single purchase in the month, and by the report's own chart only 6.5 percent made five or more.
So a free game's purchase revenue rests on a thin layer inside a thin layer. The industry calls its biggest spenders whales. The word describes how much a player spends, not why. Heavy spending by itself says nothing about whether any one person has a problem, and the figures here do not measure that.
Is a 2016 number still worth repeating?
The figure is a decade old, and it has limits worth knowing. It comes only from games that used one analytics company, and that company sells developers tools for earning more from exactly these spenders. It counts payers in a single month rather than over a player's lifetime, and it covers in-game purchases only, not ad money. It is the best-known measurement, not an audited one.
Swrve's earlier report found a similar shape. In 2014 it put 0.15 percent of players behind 50 percent of a month's purchase revenue. The exact share shifts from report to report, and with the period each one covers, but each time the group is tiny.
A broader check came in 2023. A peer-reviewed study by Zendle and colleagues followed $4.7 billion of purchases by 69.1 million players in 2,873 mobile games over 624 days, and found that games differ. In 34.4 percent of them, the players who paid spent roughly similar amounts, with no small group of big spenders. Those games together took in only 2.3 percent of the purchase money. So not every free game depends on a few big spenders, but most of the purchase money flows to games where spending is uneven.
The size of the business has only grown. The market research firm Sensor Tower puts what players worldwide spent inside mobile games in 2024 at $82 billion, up 4 percent on the year before, even as downloads fell 7 percent to 49 billion. Fewer downloads and more spending point to a business that leans on earning more from the players it already has.
What the players who never pay are worth
The other 98 percent are not a loss. Many free games show ads, and the simplest ones, the quick tap-and-play games the industry calls hyper-casual, rely mainly on them. The analytics firm AppsFlyer describes hyper-casual as an ad-reliant category. Bigger strategy and role-playing games lean the other way. The industry files many of them under midcore, and in AppsFlyer's 2026 report 90 percent of midcore games earn from purchases only, with no ads. A growing middle group mixes the two, and Sensor Tower counts these hybrid games among the fastest growing in 2024, with their purchase revenue up 37 percent.
Non-payers also matter in a way that is harder to count. Game makers argue that a multiplayer game needs a full world to be worth paying for. There must be opponents to beat, teammates to join and rankings to climb. In that view, the free player is part of what the paying player is buying. It is the industry's own reasoning rather than a measured fact, but it explains why games work so hard to keep people playing who will never spend a cent. Not every non-payer brings in something, though. In a game with no ads and no shared world to fill, someone who never pays earns its maker nothing.
Why prices come in gems and coins
Much of what is sold in a free game is priced not in dollars but in the game's own currency, which players first buy in bundles. Fortnite's V-Bucks are a well-known example. The real price of an item is one step removed from what the player sees on the button.
Regulators have stepped in on both what is sold this way and how the buttons that sell it are designed.
Where regulators have drawn lines
In 2018 Belgium's Gaming Commission took the view that paid loot boxes, items bought without knowing what is inside, count as gambling under existing law, and could not be sold without a gambling licence. In practice the line held poorly. A peer-reviewed study by the researcher Leon Y. Xiao, published in 2023, found that in May 2022, 82 of the 100 highest-grossing iPhone games in Belgium still sold them. Belgium's justice minister acknowledged the results, and the Gaming Commission itself has admitted that the ban is hard to enforce, given the sheer volume of games on offer.
The Netherlands went the other way. The Dutch gambling regulator had ordered Electronic Arts to pay 250,000 euros a week, up to 5 million euros, over packs in FIFA's Ultimate Team mode. On 9 March 2022 the Council of State, the country's highest administrative court, overturned the order. It judged the packs as part of the wider game, which it held to be a game of skill, rather than as a separate game of chance. The ruling was about those packs, not a finding that every loot box is lawful.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission's December 2022 settlement with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, was about how purchases were made, not about loot boxes. The FTC alleged that confusing buttons led players into charges they did not intend, including a preview button placed close to the buy button on phones, and that children could buy with a single press using a saved card. Epic agreed to pay $245 million in refunds and to stop charging people without clear consent. The order was finalized on 14 March 2023, and Epic neither admitted nor denied the allegations.
- Leon Y. Xiao : The 2022 Belgian loot box ban study
- Xiao, 2023, Collabra : Psychology
- Hocker : Loot boxes maken voetbalspel FIFA geen kansspel
- Raad van State, 9 March 2022, ECLI:NL:RVS:2022:690
- FTC : $245 million settlement alleges Fortnite owner Epic Games used digital dark patterns to charge users
- FTC : Epic Games matter, final order of 14 March 2023
The free game in your pocket, explained in one line
A free game is not paid for by everyone chipping in a little. In the best-known measurement, about 2 in 100 players paid in a month, and a fifth of a percent of players brought in almost half of the purchase money. Many of the rest are shown ads, some help fill the world the spenders keep coming back to, and some bring in nothing at all.
Swrve found that lopsided shape in 2014 and again in 2016. A 2023 study of thousands of games found most purchase money flowing to games where spending is uneven, even though about a third of games work differently. When a game costs you nothing, it is often because advertisers, or a handful of people you will never meet who spend a great deal, are covering the bill.
