Kindle News: Amazon gives some stats on its GameCircle social platform & Android tablet market share

Another Amazon offering with an added social layer

The normally tight-mouthed Amazon offered a few stats at the GDC conference in San Francisco, in connection with its GameCircle platform, launched last September alongisde the Kindle Fire 2nd Gen and HD models.

  This platform has a social layer for competition between players, which lets "players track how they're doing in games compared to friends," explains Polygon's Christopher Grant, who reports today on Amazon's sudden loquaciousness during a reception for developers and press in connection with its growing game business.

  Aaron Rubenson, director of Amazon's Appstore Initiative, wanted the group to know that, as Grant put it:

' GameCircle-enabled games have 80 percent more revenue per user (RPU) than non-GameCircle-enabled games.  Developers that have included GameCircle support in their games are a third more likely to convert free users to paid, and players are a third more likely to make in-app purchases, Rubenson said '

That's us! It's good news, though, that they'll be letting developers keep more of those payments after some real concerns about how the timing of promotions and "severity of discounts" were not proving beneficial to the creators of these apps.  Rubenson explains that they "changed these terms last year" and the new terms, Grant writes, "guarantee developers their usual 70 percent of the list price, regardless of what price Amazon drops it to..."

  The Free App of the Day doesn't work the same way though.  The guarantee isn't in effect but the developers "are compensated for making the game available."

  Amazon presented data from Localytics indicating, according to Grant's writeup, that Amazon has 56% of the U.S. Android tablet market and 33% of the worldwide tablet market.  That seems very high, but Apple is way ahead of other platforms, including Android, on this (having over 75% of that tablet market), so we are talking rapidly growing market share of a small subset so far, though not necessarily for long, the way Android is doing on smartphones.

  Several monitors of use and traffic on the web with respect to apps use have shown the Kindle Fire with a fast-growing share of the Android-based pack's share, often neck and neck with Samsung.

  On February 13, I posted the following about a January 2013 status report which I'll repeat here.

Is Kindle Fire going worldwide?
In more good news for Amazon, Localytics found that, as I Programmer reports, "Amazon's Kindle Fire accounts for a third of Android tablets on a global basis, even though it is available in only a handful of countries outside the United States."

  Of more interest to me, though, was the quote that I Programmer has from an Amazon rep:

' Localytics goes on to remind us that to date the Kindle Fire isn't even available in Canada, although at the recent launch event of the Kindle Paperwhite in Canada, Amazon’s VP in charge of the Kindle noted that they are working hard to launch the Fire lineup worldwide which should provide a boost for Android developers. '

The Localytics story has an interesting graph from January 2013 that I'll include here:

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