My first game is a free game with IAP to unlock it all through a non-consummable item (the first 8 levels are free). Pros :
lots of downloads without doing anything because of the “free game” classification I guess + some luck Cons :
Some players are upset because they don’t like to pay anything when they download a game which is classified as “free”. So bad ratings because of that from time to time.
If I believe in the analytics, lots of fraud from Lucky Patcher and others.
i’m finishing my second game which is also an “unlock it all and that’s it” kind of game. and I’m wondering if I should make the same kind of paiement or try the paid app method, directly from the store.
Could you, from your experience, give your pros and cons of these two methods ?
Do we know / or are there studies about fraud in one way or the other ?
Do paid apps manage to get seen without you pay adds, marketing and anything?
Interesting, thank you!
Indeed it does not provide answers to my questions about fraud and revenues differences in both methods.
It’s rather saying that my way of trying to monetize just one only feature to “unlock it all” (in a paid version or in an IAP freemium), which players found more ethic in general, is the contrary of what we should do to gain money. So I should propose instead, plenty of things to buy inside a freemium game. The Irony …
Oh consumerism, I hate you
Our app was paid first, because we wanted to offer our users the full experience from the beginning, without being confronted with IAP after playing a little bit.
While this was ver good rating wise, the download count was quite lacking, because we put the price tag at 2,99€, which is not appealing for a lot of customers.
After a year, we switched to the “free-to-play” model with IAP and the downloads skyrocketed after this. Obviously some new users didn’t liked IAP and gave bad ratings because of that, just like it happend for you, but overall, this is “normal” in the world of apps. You always “offend” someone with either a full paid version or a “free-to-play” version to some extend.
My suggestion would be going “free-to-play” again, as this draws in more users and with them, more ratings overall, which will negate the few bad ratings you will get.
I was more wondering about your comment about Lucky Patcher and others. If you could provide some background, I believe that would help the rest of us avoid the problems you had with this situation.
Since almost the beginning, I’ve got “wrong” analytics in IAP pre-verified Revenue (in Unity Analytics). Usually it’s displaying something like, let’s say 7643,2$ when I get only 10.2$ in the verified, real, revenues the day after. So the daily “false” pre-verified stuff is huge. These “fake” big revenues have always been rounded numbers, though.
Since 1 or 2 months, I also get, non-rounded numbers in IAP pre-verified revenues that doesn’t end up in my verified revenues the day after.
Unity Analytics isn’t very clear about these “pre-verified revenues” (or I haven’t find any constructive official article about it). They don’t say it’s fraud, but it just looks like a suspect activity around your game’s IAP.
my conversion rate is bad (0.5%) and I assume not very coherent with the quite good reviews. (just a personnal thought)
I received 2 weeks ago an email from a player, who told me about Lucky Patcher and that my game was easy to unlock. I understood that it’s as easily unlockable as any Unity game with IAP and I read on the forum that the only way to prevent this is to make an extra check-receipt on a private server each times my game is opened (so bye bye offline mode). Perhaps there are other ways but I didn’t find much more infos.
Thank you for your story.
I think I’m gonna try both methods for the next one.
I’ll start with a paid first version for 2 or 1.5$ and I’ll do a free-to-play too called “my-game-demo”, with a timer or something to unlock it all through an IAP non-consummable item, just like I did with my first game.
That’s two versions, two description front pages on the stores and each times two uploads to manage but well, I’m gonna try it.
Thank you for the background info.
I will watch the Unity analytics to see if I get anything similar.
I am getting close to having an IAP game out there. Not sure what I will do to secure the purchases better. I guess I just hope the problem is not very widespread.
