game made with unity f2p are king!

sad to see…
is this really the only busness model?

Then there was the shock, there was one thing that all publishers asked us first, is this a “Free To Play” game? We were rejected by 99% once they learned that this is not an f2p game! We had not thought about making a free to play game since we were not big fans of f2p ourselves and we just had not felt this sudden rush of f2p games. It was 2013 and the f2p waves were all around.

Why are you sad?

F2P games with a business model like Freemium are one of the effective ways to receive revenue if presented successfully.

An average game price would be 60$. Some people could spend more than 60$ on a F2P game.

Supercells gamrs bring them millions daily!
It has been reported that game Farm Ville brought total of over one billion since its release!
Valve revenue has been doubled after they made Team Fortress 2 free to play because to micro transactions!!!

So think whether you should be sad or not to use this business model.

Interesting presentation on the subject; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxFzf6yIfcc

There are arguments to be made about, not the commercial benefits of f2p but, its consequences.

Jonathan Blow is awesome. I’ve learned so much from his presentations.

Well,

For businesses, its risky to have this business model because the game itself must be worth to pay for.

For clients, they get negative effects such as addiction resulting in social negativity and other psychological stuff…

Obviously, there are other consequences for both parties, which are more serious and complicated!

Well, you only needed to be accepted by 1% in order to ship your game, right? :wink:

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Friends don’t let friends make pay-to-download games.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/215546/Inapp_purchases_really_are_most_effective_for_mobile_game_monetization.php

Why are real world rewards rated low in popularity while video ads are rated high. I thought people hated videos ads on places like youtube. Or am I reading the graph wrong?

Don’t both axes on that graph measure the same thing? I mean, assuming it’s developers who were surveyed, surely what makes a method popular is its success? Which would explain the strong correlation between the two.

That game in that article looks fun tho

also this one
https://www.facebook.com/teamcookieplease/posts/70492999561135

It’s for sale.

It’s a survey. 176 developers were asked to rank the monetizations strategies they used. So, popularity means that in-app purchases was the #1 choice on average of all the strategies among the 176 developers surveyed. These 176 developers have made a total of 1,000 games and $600 million in revenue so they have real experience.

It might not even be worth it to offer a paid download version. Interstitial ads might generate more money over lifetime compared to getting 99 cents up front.

Of those 176 developers, I’d be curious what the cost of development was. As well as how much money was spent on advertising.

F2P is the only way to generate buzz on mobile. P2P is dead on mobile unless you have a big following on PC before you ship to mobile. Mobile players are stingy with their money and honestly I don’t blame them. When the market first opened up games were charging 2.99-5.99 for everything. Remember on your old phones(non smart phone) how much games were? 6.99 and that was for a where is waldo game. People got burned, paying 3 bucks for a game that was garbage. Then games hit the buck era. Everything was a buck, and still people would get burned. Games that were not what they showed in their pictures, or games that crashed and didn’t run. Now we are in the F2P era and mobile games will remain their until one of two things happen.

One - Apple filters out the games that don’t deserve to be on the app store…
Two - People stop paying buying IAP’s…

Both of those things won’t happen. You have a slightly better chance at number two happening but apple won’t ever filter out the garbage because by filtering out the garbage they have to spend money to have people filter it out, then they lose money by not having people download those games so they don’t make their 30%, less developers buy the $100 iOS license each year.

F2P sucks because it forces developers to change how a game should be made. Rather than just being able to make a good game. Piracy is another issue for another topic but it also is a HUGE factor in F2P becoming so popular with developers.

i HATE!!! freemium games… it is LAME!!!

and yet… … because of that graph ill probably end up making them… …

some microtransacts are okay…
but hate
pay to win,
stupid contrived bull just to make you spend money… … stupid in game limits…
path of exile’s system is just right i believe, (pay for cosmetic looks for your character), no pay to win
although i entirely believe they are selling “orbs/items” RMT clandestine-like… theyre whole game is setup to succeed in that way…

You have also done pretty well with the app, better than I would of expected. So you show that you don’t have to be f2p to succeed.

The fact some publishers are looking more for f2p games might just be their advertising network is setup for this where you just have to drive downloads and not sales (which are harder to make IMO).

The problem with most free to play games is the strategy to get players to buy IAP. Devs usually turn the game in to an excruciating grind. As a player, you either say F it and uninstall or pay for experience boosts or “energy” points. The game is basically designed to not be fun. The exact opposite of what you want as a player…

The thread is from 2014. It got unburied thanks to spammer in the post above yours.

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I had some people playing games as background noise earlier while I was working and one of them said something I think is worth mentioning, since we have an f2p topic necro’d: the difference between f2p and arcade games is that in arcades, you were putting in quarters to play the game, not to play the game less.

I think that’s something worth thinking about when people inevitably bring up the arcade argument.

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