For that last few years we have been in the educational games market. It worked well for us. No ads. No inapp. Many awards and featured by Apple. From what we have seen, when it comes to one touch games, it's all about the freemium. So we have made it for free (not released yet), we have added the watch video for coins. But, should that really be the case ? Should we go for free ? Getting money from video ads is a great way if you have millions of downloads (we even have a publisher that wants our game) but what are we missing ? Are we missing ?
IMO: I have been watching this in some of the games I play. I download a new game once a week. I noticed a small trend in some with mutli-worlds. Some have you pay real $$ to unlock worlds or levels. I am going to mix it up a little with my next game and make an items that must be paid for with real $$ like a nearly unbeatable character or the third level is $0.99. I also noticed combined things like no adds and 500 coins on the same button. Not sure if this can be done in BB, but I might look at it.
But, should that really be the case? As of lately the trend has been - Watch video for coins, bottom banner & pop-up ad after 5-8 deaths Should we go for free ? If its a one touch game I say yes go for it. Why depart from a proven system? Getting money from video ads is a great way if you have millions of downloads (we even have a publisher that wants our game) but what are we missing ? Are we missing ? Well how big is your following? If the publisher has a bigger following and a proven track record than going with them is certainly something to consider. You can still self publish and if things aren't going great than reach out to a publisher.
Yep it is all about numbers. With freemium you can get money from the ad company as well as in-app purchases. In-app purchases can be anywhere in between 1-10% -- maybe 0 if downloads are not so great -- that means maybe the marketing and/or the game itself is not so great, People just try, play with it few minutes and downloads another one... Ads can be very good. But again, numbers... If you have 10 downloads a day, do not expect anything from it. If you have 1k per day, few bucks here and there. When your game reaches the million downloads, you get good money from the ads as well as the in-app purchases. Paid downloads are more predictable. You may not get as many downloads per se, but overall maybe you will get better budget. If you do not have good marketing behind it, no one will download it that is for sure (or almost certainly sure). It is hard to say which model is good, and it always depends. I guess every indie developer wants to be the guy behind Flappy Birds and Color Switch That is why most goes to freemium and hopes the best, but that is only my speculation.
Almost Impossible is a good example for a paid game. You can find the thread on this forum searching for it. At first it wasn't "that" good. In the first month Daniel only got between 3 and 4 thousand USD earnings (after taxes and expenses) according his article on his webpage. But since then the game seems to have made a very huge rise. From 10,000 downloads it now has approximately 100,000. Probably because of the ATV support. And this are mostly paid downloads. Not bad I think for a 1 month work.
true. interesting. I wanted to add tv support but I understand that characters are not supported and also the controls are problematic to control from within BB. Also, he indeed took the less popular road for one touch games and this is exactly my point. Maybe I should go with paid and then release it for free.
Thank you - the guys with Color Switch went all the way with a guy that has massive control on social. Their videos are viral like crazy with millions of downloads and basically besides it being a great game - it was all about the marketing.
I understand that it is easier to rank in paid game categories because the download numbers are lower. I heard about one strategy where you make 'no ads' a link to your paid game (that has no ads) instead of an in app purchase. That way you drive traffic to your paid game from your free game, and your user gets more for their buck (hopefully the paid game is a value and the free one is more of a 'lite' version) This potentially could help your paid game rank higher and drive organic downloads. Any difference in the end? Who knows - I have never had more than a few thousand downloads on a game to test it. I also understand that the 'no ads' is seldom purchased anyway on most free games lately.
Now that you mention it, Daniel released some weeks after a free version. Are this gamecenter stats mixed between the free version and the paid one or are they independent? Because if they are mixed, the 100,000 downloads are not equal to income. I think the Geometry Dash concept isn't bad at all. They released a free version together with the paid one. The free version only has half of the game and only a small percentage of the characters and options the paid version has. And we all know that the paid version is in the top 10 paid games for already a long time, even now that the free version is out of the top 100. It all depends on the game I think. If you want to go for the casual gamers freemium is a good option. If you want to go for the more serious gamers then the paid one is better a lot of times. Now with BB2 we will see much more paid games I think since we can build levels and different modes. In both cases you'll need a strong marketing. Always. Most games only do great because of the marketing. It seems sometimes that the quality of the game is only secondary.
Just wondering where did you get the info that Almost Impossible has 100,000 mostly paid downloads? Thanks
The developer of A Dark Room as an interesting post on his earnings on Reddit. This is a paid game. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4f74dv/quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an_ios_game/
I think freemium offers a fair chance for you to measure effective drive traffic and achieve a conversion rate and compete with publishers. so yes to adds. until you are a known developer.
I said above that I am not sure if the free and the paid version appear together in the same game center stats. But my paid version has now over 50,000 members in gamecenter which equals at least the double in total downloads. If they all paid for the game then this is a pretty close number.
Thanks. The Free and Paid versions would have different game centers and it looks like he took the free one down. That's pretty solid for paid for sure getting six figures in a few months from one app. I wonder how his TV version is doing.
The paid version of Almost Impossible! went free for 48 hours, this gave the game a huge increase in downloads, but not much extra revenue. In total Almost Impossible! has made around ~$10k (USD). The AppleTV (and Mac) version didn't do well at all, iOS made 99.9% of the revenue. The original article with all the numbers and graphs can be found here: https://dancounsell.com/articles/ios-game-revenue-and-launch-details Hope that helps!
That is because there are AppStore indexing ppl who are monitoring price changes and tons of people subscribing to services like that. When you go to free from paid, then you get so much downloads, but obviously they do not pay. Sometimes you get some extra paid downloads right after that but not that much... To be honest I have not seen too much value of doing this, unless you need download numbers for marketing purposes.
Old thread I know. But I just wanted to say, download numbers are one of the ways to get up the charts. I'm guessing a sudden surge of downloads doesn't hurt too much either.
