Well, I’ve been developing a game that will (I hope) eventually appear on the Google Play Store.
I had the idea after speaking to one of Sega’s big guys, who inspired me to go make something appealing. Which I have (tried).
Now it’s coming to the point where I need to see how it’s going to be paid for. So I did a little market research. The top few grossing apps on the Play Store are all free to play. You can download, have a play, whatever, and it’s all for free. You can buy upgrades, and so on, and that’s how they make their money, but yeah. Free. For these guys, it seems to be a very viable solution to the monetizing problem.
But if you app fails, you’ve got no chance of making anything. Not a single penny. All that effort would have been for nothing. So then you put the price to $0.99 or whatever. Then, nobody downloads, because you have to pay.
So what’s the best option?
And here’s part 2!
If I do go the Free to Play route, then I want to know how I set this kind of thing up to make in-app purchases. How do I link it to get that money? Where does it go? And so on. Anyone who can fill me in, just give us a few tips.
Free 2 Play is good because most people browsing the store like to look at all the free apps.
Usually if I see a price on something I’ll skip it because in most cases there’s a game in the same genre that’s free to play.
Some games have gotten me hooked in this ‘free’ mode and managed to entice me into spending some $$ for some in-game coins, whereas if the app had charged that upfront, I would never have purchased it.
There are plugins from Prime31, RatRod and PlatoEvolved that can do your Android In-App purchasing for you… although I’ll warn you now, you have a lot of reading and a lot of head scratching ahead… implementing IAP with the Google store can be a freaking ballache sometimes. You’ll need a Google checkout account in order to accept payments and will need to link this to your Google Publisher account.
You’ll also need a way to store user purchases locally on the device in case the user is not connected to the net. The PlatoEvolved plugin has this built-in, or you can use the Xml object serializer/deserializer classes that come with Mono to store data for the stored purchases. Don’t forget to encrypt this data on the device. A more secure method is to setup a secure web service when the user start the application to determine which products they have purchased (the Google API doesn’t provide this). You’ll need to manually keep track of purchases yourself, either through local storage or a secure web service.
Good luck, now the first thing you need to do is read their docs a few times to thoroughly understand the process.
Any chance you can do both offer a free to play version and a paid for version offering more of the game?
Its what angry birds do. Offer’s a good free game and after hooking people offer more levels for a price.
With this option you have to make sure you don’t give to much away and make sure people know there is a paid for version with lots of extras usually by having information on the menu screen and at the end of the game or between levels.
There are lots of different ways of offering free to play this is just one way.
That’s another option commonly used method, and saves you the IAP ballache.
The best solution is to use the solution that will best monetize your game.
One of the best things about free to play is that it will encourage everyone to play it without spending anything, that is one of the main reason games like league of legends, planetside 2, blacklight retribution, and others have a ridiculously high number of people playing it every day.
Of course if you’re making an app/small game for google play/android/iOS it’s a little different from the games i mentioned.
There’s always a risk going for the free to play type since you can earn almost nothing, but like you said it’s possible to make in-game stores and use advertisements (non intrusive) so that you can earn money with every play.
In conclusion (my oppinion), if you are confident that your game can succeed, then go ahead and apply a small fee like 0.99$ or 0.49$ and advertise it; if the game is somewhat successful you will earn good money. I would also recommend a demo or trial for free, so everyone can play it and if they like it then they will buy it.
I can’t say anything regarding Part 2 since i still don’t know how that works… i’m going to find that out for my game since it’s going to have an in-game store.
I’m very cheap, but here’s how I think through purchases:
Unless I’ve seen overwhelmingly positive reviews from friends, and in some cases critics, I won’t buy a game that doesn’t have some sort of free component. The one exception was Great Little War Game for Android - I really wanted a turn-based strategy game on my tablet, so I just bought it once I determined it was at least decent.
If I get a game that’s ad-supported, I probably won’t buy an ad-free version, or click on any ads except by accident. I confess that I’m a bit of a leech when games are ad-supported.
If I get a game that has a limited subset of levels, I’ll play through the entire demo unless it starts to get annoyingly tedious. Afterwards, if I liked it, I’ll keep the demo on my homescreen as a reminder that it was kinda fun and I should buy it. 90% of the time, I’ll eventually uninstall it - but sometimes I’ll actually buy the game for the extra levels.
If I get a game that appears to be free, but is seriously limited until you upgrade to the “full” version with an in-app purchase, that’s an immediate red flag and I’m much less likely to enjoy the game.
So based on that, the game I’m most likely to buy is a level-based game with a Lite version and a Full version.
If you game is free you will have more downloads, if your game is paid your going to have less simple as that. If your game is fun I recommend putting a price tag on it and selling it. From my own game and other games I have worked on free to play doesn’t pay unless you have stuff in your game that “requires” IAP. It may seem like it’s wrong to have stuff in your game that you have to buy, but it’s the only way to make money in this market. Our game had an ad version for free and an non ad version for a buck, our free game had about 7k downloads and our paid version had less than 20, and 10 downloads were from friends. Our Apple version was 0.99(there was no free version)and we sold about 1200 copies. Yes we didn’t reach a lot of people but we made 100 times more money because we forced the user to pay instead of just grab it for free, play it once and never think about paying.
Also, free games bring in more people who are going to leave bad reviews because they are running an android with version 2.1 on it and the game crashes and they say the game sucks and leave you 1 star, but yet they haven’t played it. People who are going to download your game free most likely would of never bought your game for a dollar anyways so don’t feel like your going to be losing any money going paid instead of free, to me free is selling your game short and in return not making you anywhere close the money you should of made for the time you invested to make it.
*Whoever started the 0.99 app price should burn, games on your old cell phone would cost 5.99 and the game would be 1000 times worse than games on the app store. Now if you put a 2.99 price tag on it people think the game should last forever even though it cost more to buy a red bull than a app.
I would suggest to read up on some entries on www.gamesbrief.com if you haven’t done already.
They cover and discuss the freetoplay model pretty extensively.
In the end its always about a tiny tiny amount of people that actually pay for some of the iap. So you have to gather many many many many many people to get some revenue.
And read really carefully about all these percentages. A tiny amount makes up most of the revenue for insane amount of games, but you already mentioned the risk in your first post
But in the end it doesn’t matter what model you choose. If your game is not exceptional in one or more disciplines, it won’t make anything.
Pixel prospector is another valuable info station. Lots of post mortem links there: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/
Again, just incase you haven’t come around these
You just have to be brutally honest about your game. People are realllly picky and if your game is just mediocre, nobody will purchase, just because one did it on his own with limited resources and/or experience
Also it’s quite a science to set up a proper IAP environment. It’s nothing that you can do at the end of the dev cycle in a couple of days. You gotta be really careful about it. See gasketball example as a warning sign.
However,.here is a recent example of what I experienced.
I browsed games like Kingdoms of Middle Earth. Read reviews. “Good game,…but so obnoxiously slow unless you pay upgrades”
I downloaded Plague,Inc. Free.
Played it on normal,…couldnt win but came close. Had fun though. Played it on casual…beat it still had fun ,…unlocking new (genes/powerUps) .
It was clear that in order to beat the game on Normal( which would unlock new types(classes), I needed these powerUps.
In order to use those genes I unlocked though,…I needed to buy the full game 1$. Which I did.
Now the entire game is unlocked and I can progress normally. They did not make it time/day/ energy limited. You beat the levels you advance.Period.
If I really wanted to I did have the option to pay to unlock the next level, but playing ‘normally’ will do fine.
I love this game,…I still play it every night,.slowly getting farther. This I like…not artificially whatever,.u get it.
tl;dr
I like free limited demo, option to buy FULL game and be done with it.
I am also ok with reasonable Expansions,.( not DLC nickle and dime crap)
You can always go from pay to free, but not the other way around.
On mobile devices, I play free, demo and lite games that give too much away. In other words, I’ve had so much fun and time with their free stuff, what’s the point of buying their pay version? I’ll only play something for so long before it becomes boring.
If your game is exceptionally good, people will pay for it. If your game is exceptionally good, it’s free, a lot of people download it, and it generates money from ads, you could potentially make some good money.
IAP? There are some books that cover the strategy to make money this way, and what motivates people to buy things. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the titles, but you definitely need to do the research to go this route - but people won’t buy things unless your game is exceptionally good.
Here’s the thing too…
People create different strategies and a road map for making money - i.e. start with a full-blown pay app, then if that doesn’t work, try a lite and pay version, and if that doesn’t work, try free with ads, etc. etc.
But the most important thing you need, is an exceptionally good game. If it’s good, it will make money.
Free To Play is just the new shareware model… try before you buy, with buying options that are more integrated than before ie you can buy more content/abilities/whatever in the game instead of going to some hokey website to buy the full version. The main reason it got a special name is because people weren’t really offering trial versions on mobile devices, it was like buy the full version or maybe get the limited lite version, then someone of course wanted to know how to enhance the # upgrades from lite to full and hence integrating the payment methods into the app etc and make the app capable of accessing more content.
I find ads annoying even if they’re supposedly relevant, and especially when they’re not, and especially when I have to spend time waiting for the stupid thing to get done before I can keep playing. I don’t want to be force-fed this crap. I literally look away and skip it as soon as possible, it’s a major buzz-kill that disrupts the atmosphere and flow of the game, if it has any. That said obviously many companies are making a lot of money from this approach. I think it is valid to say there are some benefits to asking to be paid up-front - as mentioned above, it encourages more people to actually pay who want to get access enough to part with money, whereas when they don’t have to many will just avoid it and take advantage of checking out the game first and typically deciding later they don’t want to buy it.
You watch though… give Free to Play a few more years, let it become even more commonplace, then it will suddenly become new to ask for an up-front fee and people will call it free to pay or something. It’s a social trend.
Edit: good suggestions in there. But, please, don’t do a SWTOR and sell power (by which I mean the dreaded Lv.10 pink-purple weapon crystal that has Lv.50 stats.)
Free is the only way forward now… even in pc games (unless you’re a big publisher with the power to demand money). Even Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, Wow, offer free versions of their games now. The idea being you get someone to play, then if they like it and want all features/more features, they pay.
My plan to make money:
Single Player free/Multi-player pay once (this would be the equivalent of buying the full game)
Various in-game purchases (dont offer better guns, I HATE this practice), offer things like skin customisation, pets, etc, whatever you can fit into your game.
Also, 1000x free downloads is better than 10x paid downloads.
Generally the free should work forever… its hard to tell you what to make paid since we have no idea what your game is… but here are some real world examples.
Diablo 3: Free single player on Normal difficulty. Not sure if you could do any multi-player, but you definitely couldn’t be invited to a game with friends.
Starcraft 2: Free single player, Limited multiplayer (only 4 maps to choose from)
Tribes Ascension: Free Singleplayer/Multiplayer. In game purchases of weapons is the money maker
