Would love some marketing/pricing advice - Ads IAP

Unity Engine
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1

So i took a little over a year out from iOS development to finish University, and noticed the market has changed a bit since I’ve been gone!

I have a game on iOS which I’m planning to update significantly, as well as port it to Android as a Facebook game.

It’s current business model is a F2P game with 16 levels, and 120 levels with more features if they buy for £1.99.

We’re adjusting this slightly into one of two models:

Option 1) Similar to before, we offer a small subset of levels for free and allow the user to buy all of them for £1.99 once they’ve finished. However, we also allow them to buy chapters (of which there are 4 on release), which will consist of 30 levels each and will cost £0.69. Buying the full game is cheaper and includes future chapters for free. Ads will display in our game, and can be removed by any purchase.

Option 2) We offer the full game for free, fully supported by ads (with the in app purchase to remove them). Regular updates will be made to keep user retention as high as possible.

The second option sounds promising, but equally daunting. I haven’t yet made any games which use ads, so I have no idea how much money they could potentially bring in. The second has the added advantages of keeping a larger percentage of players due to no purchase barrier, and it also allows me to place the full game on Facebook and link from there to mobile platforms.

So my question (after all that!) is will either of these models work when implemented correctly? And could option 2 be more profitable if I focus on user retention?

As I said, the markets changed a little since I was last here, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

2

how u displaying ads in unity?using any plugin?

3

Interstitial, using Chartboost. Haven’t integrated them yet, but thinking of displaying ads after each level, so long as a couple of minutes has passed so they’re not spammy. Will be tweaking them constantly though.

4

Something else we have pondered is letting people watch a video ad (through adcolony) in order to unlock more content. They would have the option to either watch the ad to unlock the next set of levels, or they could buy the full game outright, removing ads completely.

I cant find much information about the average amount of money earned through each video watch though.

Is this feasible? I don’t want to annoy my users.

5

I haven’t used AdColony but I’ll share my experience with Vungle.

In Omega Drive I use video ads three ways: 1) To give a free continue gem, 2) to give free coins and 3) as an auto-play after they reach game over and press the Continue button (about 3 minutes of playtime). I still offer the free coins for watching videos the third way, and I hope that takes the pain out a bit for the user.

You can check out the game to see the implementation. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omega-drive/id434937881?mt=8

Overall eCPM for these ads in Omega Drive is about $8.50, which is very good considering most of my users are in the Middle East, where ads don’t usually monetize as well in general.

Players can also buy coins and gems with real money as IAP, but overall I am earning much more with ads than with IAP. In a well designed monetization scheme this should be the other way around, but like you, I added all of this stuff as an update and not as part of the original design of the game.

Basically the question you have to ask is: Is it more likely you will get 115 people to watch a video ad, or sell one person a 99 cent IAP? At an $8.50 eCPM, both options will earn you about 70 cents. If you offer both options as you suggested, you’re covered either way, and it’s my opinion that players will watch an ad to “save money” on an IAP item. So in that sense the IAP price is just there to show them what a great deal they are getting by giving up 15 seconds of their time.

I’m also using video ads in Hologram Projector, a novelty app that lets you view 3D models with hologram shader effect.

In Hologram, users get a handful of holograms for free and they can unlock 10 new ones, which are revealed one at a time with a little spinning animated button. The first button just unlocks a new hologram for free. The remaining 9 each show a 15 second Vungle ad before the hologram is unlocked. So a casual fan might watch one video, while a big fan will watch all 9.

The overall user numbers for Hologram are much lower than Omega Drive, but Hologram is doing about $15 eCPM.

6

I’m doing Option 2 in my games.

Ads are very easy to implement - I’m using Prime31s iAd and AdMob.