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by cclogg
4589 days ago
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Not the author but I thought I should chime in here. The app store is a difficult beast these days... being free means you get a lot more downloads, but you need 100's of thousands (if not millions) of users to make any decent amount of money. And you have to be very careful with your freemium plan. You don't want to end up like http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/going-broke-with-... If you're a paid game, you're going to have a very hard time getting sales, because you can't acquire users. The 99 cent 'race to the bottom' also means you need a lot of sales, but it's tough to achieve that today without a brand or big-name. Even Apple featuring you doesn't add up to as much as it used to. So, you might have noticed a pattern amongst the more successful freemium titles. Lots of wait timers, short gameplay bursts, unlimited purchasables, etc... what hardcore gamers deem as evil, is actually what these companies have determined is the most optimal way to make money. I'm not trying to be depressing here lol, but before you make the decision to go free, make sure you understand what you're up against. I personally hope we can head to a more League of Legends type model where you make $5 on a lot of people rather than the Farmville route of making $5000 on a few 'whales'. I personally much prefer a great game that lets me pay when I'm ready to invest, than a game that is trying to milk me the whole time. Just an FYI, me and a friend built Stratosphere: Multiplayer Defense for iPad and have gone through much of this dilemma lol. Good luck! |
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The more traditional games — games with more genuine depth behind them, from the point of view of the "hardcore gamers" you mention — when they make money, they tend to be pay-up-front. They're charging more for a significantly more personal and higher-quality engagement, and can partially make up for lower quantity that way.
But even then it's been really hard to know how to approach these questions. My advice is to release something small quickly, because being in the situation is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. That's not exactly what we did here, and though I'm really happy with how the game has turned out, we sometimes felt like we were fumbling in the dark on the way to this point.