Do you consider banner ads and interstitials in mobile F2P and paid game updates ethical or a deal-breaker?
I’ve noticed a trend with popular F2P mobile games where updates (often automatic on most peoples devices) cause banner and interstitial ads to appear in loading screens and cut-scenes.
People are also reporting that the ads do not disappear even after purchasing more virtual goods.
A few years ago, banner ads and interstitials in a paid/F2P mobile games would’ve been unacceptable.
Yeah after you put any money in a game there should be no ads.
I’m fine with ads in free games though.
I’m currently experimenting with a game that has 25% of the game levels as free (7 levels including a boss battle) and has ads (banner / interstitial). One purchase unlocks the remaining 21 levels and removes ads. Do you guys think that’s acceptable or should a game with content locked behind a paywall not have ads at all?
I think that’s fine. As long as you remove ads when you unlock the levels.
Of course the ads could affect whether people choose to unlock the levels. It might put them off, on the other hand it might encourage them to get rid of the ads! Who knows.
BTW. No one ever became a millionaire from ads.
Flappy Bird? I’m completely certain it has happened with at lease one game… probably several.
This. Man just thinking about flappy bird makes me want to scream.
Yeah, but those $50,000 a day rumours have no basis in any facts.
If on average you earn $10 from a thousand downloads that would require 5 million downloads per day. I don’t think even flappy birds was managing that.
You’re clearly wrong there. The revenue earned by an app doesn’t merely depend on the number of downloads but mostly on the time it has been played or used. You’ll very likely spend an hour even reaching a score of 30 or 40. The app has been downloaded 50 million times, and has accumulated over 47,000 reviews in the App Store — as many as apps like Evernote and Gmail. The number of impressions is just mind boggling and it could easily rack up 50k no sweat.
Theoretically that’s no proof either, since you can buy thousands of fake downloads and reviews. But these are not real players. When I checked Flappy Bird (Browser) it was a very masochistic, non rewarding game. Makes you either throw the phone out the window or uninstall it rapidly - eventually being the reasons why the developer removed it from the store himself. Therefore I wouldn’t be sure that this game stays on the phones very long, except for die-hard fans.
Regarding the 50.000$: there is no proof that it was 50.000 dollars. In fact it could have been 50.000 VND which is Vietnamese Dong (developer was from Vietnam). Exchange rates show that 50.000 VND equals ~1-2 dollars, which is a much more realistic value given how “much” you earn by ads.
Unfortunately the sad truth is, that lots of magazines don’t care about details anymore. There is even a high chance the so-called-journalists interpreted 50.000 D(ong) as 50.000 D(ollar). No kidding. If you crawl through the news articles yourself, you’ll only find “alleged” speculations, but no detail research. The same message is copied everywhere without further investigation. It’s just about the figures, just about the show.
And then ask yourself: if you develop a game which makes everyone angry and annoyed - would you simply remove it from the store? Maybe, because you want to entertain people, not make them angry. But would you remove it from the store if it makes you billionaire or would you remove it only if it earns you a minor disposable income? That’s the question…
You can make tons of money on ads in games, and I think the potential is unlimited! I don’t know about Flappy Birds, but I can speak from my own personal experience. Lets just say I made enough money from Google Adsense alone that it allowed me to leave my day job 2 years ago and go full-time indie ever since! Make a good game people like, monetize it correctly using Ads, Market the Game well enough or find the right publishers and you’ll make it. Although much easier said than done ofcoarse, every game has it’s own set of challenges to make it successful.
Larry Page and Sergei Brin will be devastated.
Congratulations to you 
Actually I do not doubt that it is possible to make a lot of money (wasn’t it that Rovio claimed at some point that ads made more money than direct sales? (being inverse previously). It’s just that the reportings from Flappy Bird are questionable.
Yeah, didn’t say you couldn’t live off ads. But $25,000 a year does not a millionaire make. (well unless you saved every dollar for 40 years). Plus say you get $5 per thousand views of an ad. You’d do better just selling 6 apps for $1 each. Unless you trick people to “accidentally” click on your ads…
Also Flappy Birds was a random anomaly. Made popular because some celebrity was seen playing it.
Lets be realistic here. Ads are not sustainable because the amount of people who have to download your app is limited by the population of the planet which is 7 billion people.
Lets say your app was VERY popular and 1% of the population of Earth downloaded your app and you got $1 per thousand people in ad revenue. You’d make a maximum of $70,000 ever. Not quite enough to retire! Ask yourself “Would an advertiser pay me $50,000 a year to advertise in my app?”
Better off making a really good niche game and selling it for $10. Then you only need 100,000 people to buy it to be a millionaire. (The “Minecraft” model). And make sure you localize it, so that way you only need 1000 sales each from 100 different countries.
Where ads are good though is for freemium where you can get a little extra revenue for people who decide not to upgrade to the “pro” version.
Yea, I don’t know if Flappy Bird made Millions, but i’m pretty sure he made enough money and if re-invested his profits properly he can probably retire right about now.
It’s actually pretty common trend for games in end of life. Kind of way squeeze every last penny out of game. In fact there are a couple of games that were never F2P, purchase only that now have ads. California Gold Rush is a good example. I bought it long ago, and recently it was updated. That update was basically the inclusion of ads. There are several others like that as well.
When a game gets old and is ready to retire, there are companies that purchase those games, make them free and include ads. Pretty much all of Digital Chocolate did that, and even some of our old games were sold to companies like that.
I think that people have to come to expect that F2P or that purchases remove ads (a common practice on FB premium games). I wouldn’t say it was unethical, (I pay for cable and still get ads), but I would consider it distasteful, and probably a deal-breaker, especially if it was a game I have already paid for.
If it’s free I don’t think anyone can really complain about what’s in it, even if there’s also the option to pay for stuff. Nobody’s twisting your arm to either pay or play. So if you don’t like what you’re getting, don’t do it any more.
If each user played for 20 minutes, they would see 40 ads, so you would need 25 users to download your app to earn $5. As the developer only gets $0.70, not $1 for each paid download, you would need 8 users to earn more than $5.
Which is more likely, 25 free downloads or 8 paid downloads?
These are only rough figures ($5 eCPM is extremely high currently for example), especially as average play time per user will vary widely, but my point is the decision on ads or paid is not clear cut. Look at your app.
But one thing I think is clear cut: No ads as soon as a player has spent any money in your app.
What others are saying is that If it’s free to play (which you’ve emphasized) and the player purchases virtual goods, then they’ve essentially paid for the game app.
While I agree with this, there are developers who will complain that the player isn’t spending enough in order to completely remove the ads.
Your numbers assume that each player only see a single ad, then quit the game never to play it again. If that 1% of the population played the game for an hour (assuming that the ads are always on screen, refreshing every minute with perfect fill rate) then you could make up to $4,200,000.