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Devs - Game monetization, a few thoughts

Not sure if this is the correct forum to post this to but there seems to be a lot of devs here that may be interested, mods feel free to move if there's a more relevant forum / sub.

So here's my two cents on monetization of your games, which is aimed at what I class as "indie" developers, 1 or 2 people with zero budget for marketing. Essentially people that love making games and would like to be able to buy some decent food once in a while ;)

Priced Game
I've been here and done this 3 years ago, my shooter game went on Google Play and the App Store for $0.99 and I thought that worst case scenario I'd get about 1000 downloads on each platform. Over two years I had about 100 on iOS and 60 on Android, TWO years!

I'm not saying that it's impossible to charge for your game but as an unknown dev with no paid marketing, you're going to have to come up with something extremely original + you'll still need a lot of luck. For a complete stranger to part with their cash based on a few screenshots and possibly a video is a HUGE ask, especially when there's a massive amount of high quality free stuff available.

My advice: Make your games FREE, at least until you're on the radar.

Adverts
I also have a game with banner ads, which has about 1200 downloads and is making pennies per month. Personally, I would only ever use banner ads as I feel that interstitial ads ruin the experience, if I see an interstitial within 30 seconds of playing a game, I'll usually delete the app.

My advice: Put banner ad code in your game (I use AdMob) but don't activate it until you've got some download momentum, 500-1000 at least. If you really want to use interstitials, keep them to a minimum.

IAPs
I've never done this as it generally compromises the game design & flow. Adding in-game currency and locking items or levels usually degrades the gameplay experience, which will reduce the chances of your game going viral.

My advice: Unless you've designed your game to take advantage of IAPs from the ground up, don't bother trying to crowbar them in. The only IAP I would ever add would be one to remove adverts, this kind of acts like a priced game, without the leap of faith required to buy a priced game.

Hope this was relatively interesting, feel free to share your successes (or failures) about making money from games.

Thanks,
Ronny
 
In-game currency is a common strategy for monetisation. It works because people generally are impatient, and want to speed up their progress. But what I can't stand is games which become unbelievably slow for players who prefer not to buy their progress. Two examples that come to my mind are Dungeon Keeper, which was universally criticised for slowing down gameplay to a massive extent, and Real Racing, in which the player must accumulate gold coins to progress and if you don't have enough, your progress will be slow. Both games by EA btw.
 
Yep, for a big company with a huge audience, in-game currency and IAPs are definitely the way forward. This is why there are so many insanely high-quality free games in the the Play store ... unfortunately, this makes it even harder for small devs to compete, as the quality bar for free apps is way too high :(
 
It's a tough market, for sure, and there are some highly creative people out there. The big companies have the resources to produce these very high quality games, and let people play them for free. Very hard for indie game developers to compete with that, but not impossible. Fortunes have been made from very simple ideas.
 
I'm pretty a newb in this field and just recently released my first game. I also included advertisement. However, as I personally also don't like disruptive ads inside games, I made this: I created a button where you can get extra coins. If you click on it an advertisement appears. However, the extra coins are not mandatory for a good game play. So it's more like using a cheat to get more coins, or, if a user wants to support the developer.

Anyway. Up to know, I cannot tell if this will be a good strategy and maybe this strategy simply sucks :D

In order to compete with companies, maybe one could focus on ideas that are too crazy or non-mainstream, that no company will ever spend money to realize such an idea :thinking:
 
I think the most important thing really is to be enjoying yourself making games and getting stuff out there for people to try and give you feedback on. My personal strategy would be:

1. Release a stable game with no monetization, make it FREE.
2. Get player feedback & improve the game.
3. Build up an audience (social media & forums), wait for maybe 500+ downloads.
4. Add in banner advert code with an IAP to pay the minimum price to remove the ads.

That way, you don't have any barriers to building the momentum you'll need to make money. Once you have a captive audience, you can start thinking about (subtle) ways for them to give you their hard earned ca$h ;)
 
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