Free to Play or go Paid? Mobile Game Business Decisions

A writer at Gamasutra decided to ask some mobile game developers about their business models for their respective games. Some of them chose to go free to play and others went the fully-paid route. Their responses to the questions provide some insight into their decisions. However, like most decisions it comes down to the kind of game you’re trying to make.

Here’s one of the many responses:

I still think a F2P puzzle is a lot harder to monetize than other F2P genres, mostly because the content is limited and requires a lot of level design.

Candy Crush is the best example of highly successful F2P puzzle. They have more than 250 levels and are still producing a lot of content and find new gameplay mechanics with every update to keep their current userbase. That’s a lot of content, 2x more than what Angry Birds has.

The other thing that’s hard in general with an F2P game is balance – to monetize you have to create gameplay mechanics which involve timers, and some developers will also play with frustration to push the player to buy bonuses or boosts.

Read more at Gamasutra.

To augment the information gleaned from the Gamasutra article I suggest reading about the challenges of marketing a game. It’s not what it used to be at all.

Overall, ZeptoLab says it will spend around $1 million launching “Cut the Rope: Time Travel,” which traces the adventures of the green monster Om Nom as he meets versions of himself in time periods like the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. On top of that sum, which includes the costs of animation, the company is counting on some free help by promoting the game inside its other titles.

It’s essentially to think about the business plan and the game design concurrently.



April 26th, 2013 by Adam

Two Developers on Indie Sales Figures and Free Promotions

Sales figures and how successful promotions are for indie games are hard to come by. As a result I really appreciate it when people take the time to write up and publish their numbers (and overall experience) from selling their games.

Hitbox Team who created Dustforce and they decided to share their success because they found that similar analysis is hard to get:

FINDING GAME SALES DATA IS NOTORIOUSLY HARD. Video games have traditionally been a “hits driven” industry – the majority of revenue for a publisher comes from a handful of big commercial successes. With so many non-hits being made, publishers try to keep sales numbers a trade secret, as the more disappointing figures can be worrisome to investors. This trend has made discussing sales figures an uncomfortable topic, akin to talking about your salary.

Their write up on Dustforce sales figures is absolutely brilliant and has nice graphs like this one. It’s worth the read.

With any luck, we’ll see more developers post their results. Even if a game didn’t work out as well as expected, sharing the numbers and one did can be helpful to others.

That’s sales though. What about promotion?

Polymer is an iOS game that recently saw success. The person behind the game explored some promotional services to get the game on people’s mobiles and the results are interesting. An analysis of the game’s promotion is worth reading because it covers not only which promotion service worked best but it also goes into how Polymer changed based on player feedback.

To fix this problem, I have decided to switch to charging $2.99 with just cosmetic IAP’s instead of charging $1.99 with optional gameplay IAP’s. This is what I plan to do from now on. I do not believe that gameplay IAP’s are evil in any way, or that they are wrong. They work for many games and are clearly very successful. But unless something goes terribly wrong, I just want to make premium games without any possible way someone could see my game design as corrupted.



April 22nd, 2013 by Adam

Round-up of Good GDC Vault Presentations

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Sadly, I’m not going to GDC this year so to make up for it, I scoured the vault to find presentations I previously enjoyed as well as new ones (to me). I thought I’d share some of my favourite talks for other people who, like me, are missing out on this year’s fun.

The GDC Vault has a nearly every presentation and panel from previous GDC events. There is a ton of content within it which is really good and you should go through it to find stuff directly related to you. Below, are links to some choice GDC presentations from 2011 & 2012.

All the links are to free content in the vault (some  presentations that have only slides below may have video for paid accounts).

 

From GDC 2011:

 

From GDC 2012



March 25th, 2013 by Adam

Canada is #3 Worldwide in Video Game Development

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The Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESA) released their Essential Facts 2012 (here’s the PDF) report not too long ago and it’s filled with fun facts! According to the ESA’s research Quebec has the greatest number of industry workers while Ontario is expected to have the fastest growth.

Some notable facts from the 2012 edition:

  • The average age of a Canadian gamer: 31
  • 58% of Canadians are gamers
  • 54% of males and 46% of females play video games
  • 80% of Canadian households have at least one cell phone, tablet computer or other mobile device

The Globe and Mail picked up on the report and highlighted the fact that Canada’s video game industry is the third largest in the world right now. They also have a great breakdown and visualisation of the ESA’s report, you can view their presentation here.



March 21st, 2013 by Adam

Insights Into Making and Pitching Board Games

At this year’s Board Game Jam we were lucky enough to have two professional board game designers share their knowledge. Sen Foong Lim and Jay Cormier, who are the Bamboozle Brothers made the popular games Belfort and Train of Thought.

They spoke to the attendees of Board Game Jam via Skype about what it’s like to design and sell games around the world.

  • In something akin to a questions and answers session they covered:
  • Prototyping games and getting them ready to pitch
  • What conferences and conventions are like
  • How to playtest and get good feedback
  • What level of finished art should you have in your game to show a publisher
  • The growing trend of mixing board games and digital games

We recorded their words of wisdom and you can listen to them below. Feel free to connect with them at BoardGameGeek (Sen, Jay).

You can buy Belfort at Amazon and Train of Thought at Tiny Minstrel Games.



March 13th, 2013 by Adam
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