In 2013 the biggest game in the Western world was earning about $1.32 per user per month.
On the same table, at the top, sat a tank game earning $4.51 — from 9.1 million monthly players, while League of Legends counted 58.5 million. Five times the audience. A third of the money per player.
Decompose it
ARPU is conversion times ARPPU: how many pay, times how much the payers pay. A sick ARPU means one of the two is sick, and you can isolate which with nothing but public numbers and one industry constant.
Take the monthly actives at the point where the sources agree — 32 million — and $1.32 gives you about 42 million dollars a month. Assume the standard ARPPU for Western client games, roughly $35, and divide. It lands on 1.2 million payers. Under four percent.
The payers of League of Legends paid normally. There were simply almost none of them.
Not an ARPPU problem. A conversion problem — under five percent, in a category where fifteen to twenty-five is normal and the best fair-play titles reach thirty. Most operators of a PC client game stuck below ten percent shut it down.
Riot built the biggest game in the West anyway.
Three levers
Revenue is users × conversion × ARPPU. They scaled the one that forgives the other two — and they scaled it with stadiums instead of ads, because at $1.32 per user, buying installs is arithmetic suicide.
Reach forgives everything. It is also the hardest of the three to get.