13 ms·

It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase. That way you can download

• robdrimmie 13y ago
  This is completely possible and as a consumer my preference. Most hidden object games follow this practice.
• Fasebook 13y ago
  Not only this, developers shouldn't shy away from charging what they think the game is worth, $5, $29, $59, $99, whatever. If the game is good, people will pay it.
  • chadillac 13y ago
    I would bet the higher that price the less likely the sale and also the more likely the piracy. Charging even $5 for a game will likely drive your actual installs and sales through the floor. If you make a good product but most people can't justify paying for it, they'll just find an alternative means of playing it. Also the pump and dump industry in the app stores especially in gaming is another thing you have to worry about. You make a good game at a $10 price tag within a couple weeks you'll find your exact game with slightly altered graphics and a similar name that will be under cutting your price point. This used to be much worse, but unless you're a big studio like EA, Rovio, or King it's still a problem for you as a little guy.
  • throwaway092834 13y ago
    This is simply not true. Price has an enormous impact on units sold.
    • bertil 13y ago
      Price elasticity is strong, but the original comment is presumably assuming you can make a decent revenue with a non-minimum price tag. For instance, imagine a game listed as free: - a freemium model let you play 15 levels and asks for 4.99 to unleash 500 more levels, maybe let a 1.99 option for 100 levels; this should convert 3-5% with a million testing players; v.s. - free-to-play with locking levels every 10 levels that are so hard you have to use bonus, that would convert 1% to pay for either a Golden Orb for 1.99, or a Golden Blast for 5.99, etc. each who may or may not make a difference, and appease your frustration, and work only once. You get a couple of whales (desperate, clueless players) who pay 50$ a month, but even with a larger distribution (two to three millions players) you don't break even. The idea in the original comment is not that a price twice higher will double sales, but more that having a price tag (which free-to-play games deny having) makes sense for good games.
    • Fasebook 13y ago
      Sure, if units sold is your only metric, then optimize for that.
  • Macha 13y ago
    I can't think of anyone without an already established reputation managing to do OK at a $5+ price point in the last year or two. Like literally the only example of paid games I can think of to do one on phones in recent year are Minecraft, Final Fantasy and GTA.
    • Fasebook 13y ago
      People pay $99 for 99 lives in Bjorks Butter Batterer. People will pay $99 for a real game. "already established reputation" is overrated in the age of the internet. Lets hope the internet is still around these days.
  • oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
    I remember paying ~ £5 in the 80s for 8bit games on cassette tape and considering it a bargain. I remember when Street Fighter II came out on the SNES ~ 20 years ago. It was priced at ~ £65-70 and people snapped it up (I DO remember considering it expensive, in relation to the normal price for SNES games which must've been about £30-40). If prices had kept up with inflation, 'budget' games would be about £12; blockbusters, over £100. Games are well undervalued on app stores, and exploitative rubbish is the result. I've personally paid reasonable small amounts for some of the classic games (e.g. Monkey Island) and am on the lookout for good modern games at about the same price point.
  • JabavuAdams 13y ago
    Incorrect. The problem new devs face isn't even really that people won't pay for the game. It's that no one knows about the game. It's all good and well that 100 of your friends and acquaintances will pay $20 for your game, but you really need 10000 people to buy it.
• argonaut 13y ago
  The problem with that approach is that you are likely to get lots of highly negative (one-star) reviews.
  • snowman41 13y ago
    Great point.
  • xerophtye 13y ago
    I can already hear "greedy devs charging me money for levels"
• ii 13y ago
  Sorry, I haven't read your reply and replied with almost the same thought. It is not hard to do and many developers already do this, Triple Town by Spry Fox is doing exactly that for example.
• cclogg 13y ago
  The issue is that you'll run into the Gasketball problem of having 100,000 players but limiting the amount of things they can buy (should every player be worth $1.99 IAP?). It's just a math problem, and the reality is that you want to do it like League of Legends where you can never run out of things to buy for a long time, but of course whilst not being annoying like most mobile games are currently. I think it's better for players to enjoy a game fully for free (if you're doing IAP), and then provide ways to monetize that enhance their experience. Ramin Shokrizade has lots of amazing blogs about this: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/914048/ http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/914048/
  • michaelone 13y ago
    Definitely: I think the only real solution for the industry at this point is finding better ways to monetize with IAP that don't mix so heavily with the gameplay. And League of Legends is a great example of keeping the gameplay separate from the monetization. No pay to win, no timers, no paywalls that ruin the experience: we need to go back to building games as entertainment experiences, and find ways to monetize with things like skins (purely aesthetic so they don't disrupt gameplay, but can make you look cool when you play with your friends). Unfortunately the sad truth is that for the majority of mobile games if you charge up front you will not have enough sales volume. And a single $1.99 IAP has the same problem because while you might get 10x downloads from being free initially, you'll still only get your $2 from <10% of them, and $2 LTV is not nearly enough to support a game (+ some gamers like those here might be willing to support a great game with more than $2 but won't have the option to do so in this setup). At the end of the day, when people invest in an entertainment experience they want to be entertained. And thinking about money and waiting for timers during the experience only reduces the amount of entertainment we get out of it. So we need to find ways to design IAP that is separate enough from the core experience, and yet still works well enough to fund the games we want to play.
    • pilooch 13y ago
      let s mine bitcoins as playing, a primitive Ender's game if you will.
    • 13y ago
• frostmatthew 13y ago
  > It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase. This is pretty much what id Software did in the 90s with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake and most people in the industry thought they were nuts and it would never work. Obviously it worked extremely well (the difference being it was levels that were gated instead of features, but same concept).
  • acchow 13y ago
    Yes, it works well. But mobile gaming companies have discovered that selling drugs is far more lucrative.
• mattmaroon 13y ago
  It's not necessarily difficult, and it's not prohibited, it's just not very profitable. The problem is you're cutting out the whales. You might have a $5 gate, and get 2% of people converting, whereas unlimited IAPs might only get 1% of people converting. But now some of that 1% can (and will, believe me) spend $30k a year on your game. And almost all of them will spend more than $10. Games used to do this somewhat frequently, they just don't anymore because it leaves so much on the table. Also the much lower RPUs will make paid acquisition unprofitable, and paid acquisition is the only reliable method. App stores are great if you get featured or by some fluke work your way to the top of the charts, but for 99.9% of developers, you're either doing paid acquisition or getting no substantial amount of customers.
  • hdevalence 13y ago
    Do you feel it's ethical to take $30k a year from 'the whales'?
    • PakG1 13y ago
      It's the exact same question whether it's ethical to take that amount of money from the whales in casinos. Because that's where the term whale comes from, synonymous with high rollers. It's the exact same scenario, except that in casinos, whales have a chance to make it back. But even in casinos, the rich people who can afford to be whales know that they're just throwing away their money. They're not like the poor stupid ones who go bankrupt with gambling debt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_roller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_roller
    • ANTSANTS 13y ago
      As I understand it, "whales" tend to be less "poor gullible fools maxing out their credit cards" and more "extraordinarily wealthy people that enjoy wasting amounts that seem ridiculous to us but are truly nothing but a drop in the bucket to them." The term "oil prince" is trotted out sometimes, and people like that really do exist: I don't remember his name, but there is a very real "oil prince" who likes to go on twitch.tv and shower random (mostly female) streamers with thousands of dollars. It is an utterly bizarre experience seeing screenshots of these events, where, say, a teenaged girl is playing a game in her parent's kitchen with a webcam trained on her, the caption is something like, "wow, $person just donated $20,000 to me! thanks!", and the entire family is in the background with their mouths agape in shock. I hate these glorified slot machines, I hate the companies that make them, and I do think it's unethical to prey upon children and regular people with bad judgment, but my guess is that the average "whale" is far too wealthy to deserve your sympathy. As a different example of the same idea, do you feel bad for the celebrities that spend hundreds of dollars for a drink at an exclusive club?
• bendmorris 13y ago
  >It seems like a simple solution to me would be to make the game free, but with most features blocked behind a SINGLE in-app purchase. This is the strategy of the Ouya - games on the market have to have a free, playable demo of some type in order to be included. I think it's great, and I'd like it even more on a mobile device since my phone isn't brand new and this would let me quickly find out whether the game will even be playable.
• rkda 13y ago
  Hmmm... isn't that what id used to do with Doom? I think they're called shareware if I'm not mistaken.
• xerophtye 13y ago
  There are several highly rated games that do this. If i remember correctly, "Where's my water?" is one of them. One other great example i recently experienced was BADLAND. Its a really cool game in which they give you a level pack called "Day I" for free which has 40 levels. If you want the second set of 40 levels (which are way cooler btw), you have to purchase those. Also, they let you purchase multiplayer levels (6 of those are free btw). So just as you said, they let you demo their game and if you love it, you buy the rest of the game. But one thing i REALLY loved about the devs was that that they you EARN the extra levels. If you unlock a certain achievement, you get the Day II pack for free! So that's like the devs rewarding their biggest fans. (I unlocked those levels for free btw). Disclosure: BADLAND is also powered by video ads. You can pay a little to turn them off. There's also the option of a small fee that's not enough to buy the levels, but it lets you turn off the ads.
• blueskin_ 13y ago
  I would not object to this. Play for free, see if you like it, buy the full version. Some developers do do this, but it's much rarer than P2W.