4 ms·

"Milked" is seriously loaded. AAA console games cost $60 and up - do you know how hard it is to get a paying freemium user to even $10? Yes. There are people t

"Milked" is seriously loaded. AAA console games cost $60 and up - do you know how hard it is to get a paying freemium user to even $10? Yes. There are people that spend thousands. They also spend thousands on $60 AAA games as well. The idea that players get "fleeced" is ridiculous. Spent $15 on Candy Crush, a game that you spent months playing? That really doesn't seem like a lot to me. Edit: I should acknowledge that certain games, like Candy Crush, do play on psychological weaknesses. Not all free-to-play games (hell, I'd say vanishingly few in the sea of free-to-play games on the App Store) do. Free-to-play is the new shareware and try-before-you-buy. It's also the only real path to sustained revenue, and anyone that runs a game studio knows what I'm talking about with the roller-coaster that are games that take 1-2 years to develop and have an earnings bell-curve of 3 months.

cageface 10y ago
I'm happy to pay $15 or even $60 for a game I really enjoy and play for more than a few hours. I'm not willing to pay to win though, which is what most of the top grossing mobile games require.
- themartorana 10y ago
  No, but the point of this thread was that there is room in the middle to make money, you don't have to be in the top 200. We use rewarded video and advertising and IAP in free-to-play games our users play, but we have no desire to be exploitative. The amount of room between basic free-to-play and psychological warfare on your players is enormous.
  - Lerc 10y ago
    If you sorted your customers by the amount of revenue they generate? How much revenue comes from the individual at the bottom of the top 50% of revenue?
    - themartorana 10y ago
      It's mixed. Our most popular game is still supported by an old style of advertising, and some players that have played daily for years still prefer to look at/ignore advertising than pay the $2.99 (now $4.99) to get rid of ads. In fact, that's true of the majority of players - less than 5% of our revenue comes from that IAP. This is why I say people have told us how they want to pay us for their fun and our server costs. They've had the opportunity to pay us with money forever. Most never will. Rewarded video makes up about 10% (currently it's not in a very prominent placement, some games make a majority of their money that way - see Shooty Skies). So to kind of answer your questions, the longer people play, the more they're worth to us, which feels fair to us (and again, they can pay to rid themselves of ads anytime they want). We will be featuring rewarded video more prominently, which allows the user to have more choice in the matter (although I'm betting they chose ads over cash most of the time, but that's just years of experience talking). Edit: I should add that our ARPU (average revenue per user) is less that $4.99, so we'd still much rather people buy ads away with IAP.
- gcb0 10y ago
  I paid a ton of games. the one that got closer to being a game i can actually play for more than a week was FTL. but then playing on the phone/tablet is pure hell on higher difficulties (which is required to play it besides the very first week) after years searching, i am back at an open source chess client. sadly they are trying to add their own in-house-chrome-cast instead of just improving multiplayer. ...think in the end i always pick the games that give me an excuse to code patches. sigh. I am a lost case.
freehunter 10y ago
There's a difference between Clash of Clans and GTA V, though. There is nothing on any mobile platform that can compete in any way with any AAA game made in the last 10 years (the most advanced mobile game I see is GTA:SA, which came out in 2004 or KOTOR which came out in 2003). Hypothetically, if someone spends $60 on Candy Crush and $60 on a AAA console release, the Candy Crush developers are seeing a much more massive profit from that than EA or Activision see from their games. AAA budgets are well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Candy Crush could be exactly replicated by a 14 year old in a high school Python class. Only 2.3% of Candy Crush players pay any money. Meanwhile, King has 1400 employees and revenue of over $2.2 billion per year. But you know what's not fair? Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and makers of a whole hell of a lot more AAA games than just GTA, has a profit of $2.3b. I think the profit scales are tipped a little more towards the app developers than towards the AAA developers on this one, especially considering damn close to 100% of the players of GTA V paid for their game, and paid $60 for it. Sure, not every developer is King and not all IAPs are shitty like that. But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app. You might not get any downloads if you charge money for your software, but then again, as a mobile developer, you chose to enter that market. Which means you chose to be compared to all the other bullshit IAP scam games that dominate the "highest grossing" list. Don't want to be compared to the scam artists? Then don't play the same games as them.
- themartorana 10y ago
  So, GTA brought in 2.5B, not all of Take-Two. By mid-2013 Candy Crush had over 500m downloads, and in 2015 was still pulling over 340m monthly players. By comparison, GTA 5 sold about 235m units total so your apple-to-apple comparisons are not so much. As for "playing their game," I've been in this business since before the iPhone. I didn't choose to work in an industry that raced to the bottom for pricing. Mobile gaming is fun and enormous and provides opportunities for small devs that consoles never did. That said, there is a wide range of free-to-play monetization, not all of which is pure pay-to-win. But this is the industry - you can bury your head in the sand, but you'll go out of business. You may think jumping from one industry to another is easy, but you'd be mistaken. But you know, compare us all to King if it makes you happy. There are many people beating that drum, but they simply can't grip the economic realities of software and the mobile industry as a whole. We work to make games people love to play. We have a lot of players. They've all told us how they prefer to pay for our games so that our families might eat. That's fine with me, and with our employees who love making games.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
I should clarify. I meant they were getting milked in that if the game cost $1-5 dollars (a one time fee) they would be against paying it but they are oblivious to paying $15-20 over a year through in-app payments. I did not mean that the developer was extracting more money from them that the product is worth.

cageface 10y ago

I'm happy to pay $15 or even $60 for a game I really enjoy and play for more than a few hours. I'm not willing to pay to win though, which is what most of the top grossing mobile games require.

themartorana 10y ago
No, but the point of this thread was that there is room in the middle to make money, you don't have to be in the top 200. We use rewarded video and advertising and IAP in free-to-play games our users play, but we have no desire to be exploitative. The amount of room between basic free-to-play and psychological warfare on your players is enormous.
- Lerc 10y ago
  If you sorted your customers by the amount of revenue they generate? How much revenue comes from the individual at the bottom of the top 50% of revenue?
  - themartorana 10y ago
    It's mixed. Our most popular game is still supported by an old style of advertising, and some players that have played daily for years still prefer to look at/ignore advertising than pay the $2.99 (now $4.99) to get rid of ads. In fact, that's true of the majority of players - less than 5% of our revenue comes from that IAP. This is why I say people have told us how they want to pay us for their fun and our server costs. They've had the opportunity to pay us with money forever. Most never will. Rewarded video makes up about 10% (currently it's not in a very prominent placement, some games make a majority of their money that way - see Shooty Skies). So to kind of answer your questions, the longer people play, the more they're worth to us, which feels fair to us (and again, they can pay to rid themselves of ads anytime they want). We will be featuring rewarded video more prominently, which allows the user to have more choice in the matter (although I'm betting they chose ads over cash most of the time, but that's just years of experience talking). Edit: I should add that our ARPU (average revenue per user) is less that $4.99, so we'd still much rather people buy ads away with IAP.
gcb0 10y ago
I paid a ton of games. the one that got closer to being a game i can actually play for more than a week was FTL. but then playing on the phone/tablet is pure hell on higher difficulties (which is required to play it besides the very first week) after years searching, i am back at an open source chess client. sadly they are trying to add their own in-house-chrome-cast instead of just improving multiplayer. ...think in the end i always pick the games that give me an excuse to code patches. sigh. I am a lost case.

freehunter 10y ago

There's a difference between Clash of Clans and GTA V, though. There is nothing on any mobile platform that can compete in any way with any AAA game made in the last 10 years (the most advanced mobile game I see is GTA:SA, which came out in 2004 or KOTOR which came out in 2003). Hypothetically, if someone spends $60 on Candy Crush and $60 on a AAA console release, the Candy Crush developers are seeing a much more massive profit from that than EA or Activision see from their games. AAA budgets are well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Candy Crush could be exactly replicated by a 14 year old in a high school Python class. Only 2.3% of Candy Crush players pay any money. Meanwhile, King has 1400 employees and revenue of over $2.2 billion per year. But you know what's not fair? Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and makers of a whole hell of a lot more AAA games than just GTA, has a profit of $2.3b. I think the profit scales are tipped a little more towards the app developers than towards the AAA developers on this one, especially considering damn close to 100% of the players of GTA V paid for their game, and paid $60 for it. Sure, not every developer is King and not all IAPs are shitty like that. But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app. You might not get any downloads if you charge money for your software, but then again, as a mobile developer, you chose to enter that market. Which means you chose to be compared to all the other bullshit IAP scam games that dominate the "highest grossing" list. Don't want to be compared to the scam artists? Then don't play the same games as them.

themartorana 10y ago
So, GTA brought in 2.5B, not all of Take-Two. By mid-2013 Candy Crush had over 500m downloads, and in 2015 was still pulling over 340m monthly players. By comparison, GTA 5 sold about 235m units total so your apple-to-apple comparisons are not so much. As for "playing their game," I've been in this business since before the iPhone. I didn't choose to work in an industry that raced to the bottom for pricing. Mobile gaming is fun and enormous and provides opportunities for small devs that consoles never did. That said, there is a wide range of free-to-play monetization, not all of which is pure pay-to-win. But this is the industry - you can bury your head in the sand, but you'll go out of business. You may think jumping from one industry to another is easy, but you'd be mistaken. But you know, compare us all to King if it makes you happy. There are many people beating that drum, but they simply can't grip the economic realities of software and the mobile industry as a whole. We work to make games people love to play. We have a lot of players. They've all told us how they prefer to pay for our games so that our families might eat. That's fine with me, and with our employees who love making games.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

I should clarify. I meant they were getting milked in that if the game cost $1-5 dollars (a one time fee) they would be against paying it but they are oblivious to paying $15-20 over a year through in-app payments. I did not mean that the developer was extracting more money from them that the product is worth.