So, me and Adrien (1HPLeft) have been working on a little game called “Skyjumper”, wich is a…unique slinging game kind of, where precision and pulling ur hair out WILL be part of gameplay, trust me. But hey its fun, and i dont often say that about my own work.
So now comes the part i hate, money.
How should a game be set up on iOS and Android to even make sales? do we offer free game and rely solely on our ingame store wich offers ONLY optional items like characters and costumes, or do we put a pricetag on the game? Do we make a Lite version that plays to a certain amount of time or level and then forces the player to either buy the game, or delete it?
Alittle about myself first before u answer; i dont like money all that much when its earned the “wrong” way. I dont want to force anything on players and i dont want an ad to stay in the middle of the screen for 5 seconds ruining the flow of the game. Our ingame items purchases ar,e like i said, nothing gamechanging. The entire game can be completed, but if u want, u can buy new levels or characters, or the gems u spend to buy them if u want to do it that way. There are blue gems for unlocking levels, and the red hidden ones are used to purchase characters, these can also be bought using real money. Hey, we got bills too.
So thats my question. Our game is fairly large, it contains 7 worlds that offers 20 levels each, and later there will be some survival modes and chase modes involved.
Should the gmae be free with only ingame purcahse, ads, Lite…i have no idea, and i DONT wanna piss ppl off Candy Crush style. (yes i hate that way of making money)
The bad news: monetization should be considered from the start of game design. The good news? Not so much…
Customers expect free. So, even if your game is the bees-knees, you will still likely see near-zero downloads with an up-front cost. Course, even if you release it for free, you still have to solve discoverability. If you solve both of those, you’ll have a free app with decent downloads. And then, you can begin the soul-wrenching journey that is monetization. Welcome to the club.
TL;DR: ‘hate that’ all you want. There is no easy answer to monetization.
well it sounds like you already have it setup as a freemium type game. it depends on the fanbase you end up getting and how many people actually buy the game. there’s no right answer. i heard that angry birds made more money from ads on the free android version than from sales of the paid iphone version.
Personally I would just put iads on it then if they want to remove iads 99 cents that way there is no paywall, the freeloaders will still give you something and the longer they play it the more money you make. Even if you give it away for free people will still complain about ads so you cant please everyone.
actually we were going for a paid version from the start, but after reading up on this matter we decided to ditch that and make it free and rely only on ads. Then we realized we might aswell throw the store in there as an option for people without forcing gamechanging items.
That is interesting, i thought angry birds did well on the paid version…ads seem sot be the way to go. The guy who made Wordfeud lives pretty close to me and he said that the paid version sold decent, but the ads made him rich so…
i dunno i just dont like this bit, its very diffrent from Steam and Consoles as people pay glady for a game there. On mobile its either free or u are screwed it seems?
yeah seems like the least harmful way of doing things. People will complain nomatter what formula u use, even if its 100% free they will be wanting something extra, for free. So yeah im not even going to try, we will ofcourse keep the game as bugfree as we can and add levels and so on, we are just 2 people.
I was playing Subway surfers and those ads REALLY gets in ur way, compared to those small ones at the bottom in other games. It pissed me off almost enough to buy the game, so it works!
I feel you bro, we’re creating our game as a game, not an app. We think that F2P is a clever business-model, indeed, but a terrible and broken game-design model. If that means we won’t get that much money with the game, so be it. I’d rather have a few people who enjoy the game than force a lot of them to buy stuff in order to get a decent experience.
BUT I think it’s ok the way you want it to tackle.
Free game with all its gameplay + new level/coscmetics for a few bucks. Basically you provide DLCs
DLC’s…why didnt i think of that:P yeah thats what it is! not like candy crush that makes an addictive game so hard u HAVE to buy lifes to progress…my girlfriend is banned from candy crush,by ME!
hmmm yeah…im just really scared of all these god damn freemium solutions, dont like em. For me its pay for the game and play till u drop, but the market cries for freemium, its making people rich so obviously its what players want.
Talked to Adrien and sofar we agree on a limited free editon, and one full one…so lest see how that works out.
