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How do I make money by selling free Apps on the Android Market or Apple Store? (self.gamedev)

submitted ago by Apist

The title pretty much says. I'm thinking about selling a free game on the Android marketplace but I have no real idea how some devs make money. I know it has something to do with advertisements but how do they actually work?

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[–]devbug@__devbug 15 points16 points ago

How do you sell something that is free? Anyways... Third party advertisement companies should provide some sort of interface for displaying (or fetching) adverts. They'll either pay-per-click or pay-per-impression (view). AdMob should be a good bet.

[–]Apist[S] 0 points1 point ago

Thanks a lot. I'll look into it

[–]jusksmit 5 points6 points ago*

Howdy.

First up: don't get your hopes up for ads. The amount of traffic you need to earn a decent amount of revenue is highly unlikely to come from a single game, unless you make some sort of extraordinary smash hit. Even with a moderately successful game, you're only looking at a few hundred bucks. It's just not a reliable model unless your game takes off big time. AdMob was a good choice the last time I looked, and I think they were recently acquired by Google.

MTX is a decent option, but you have to have good incentives. Multiplayer makes this a much more appealing monetization method, but creating multiplayer mobile games isn't a cakewalk. You can definitely try MTX with singleplayer games, but the conversion rate is much, much lower. Aesthetic tweaks very rarely sell in strictly single-player games. Extra content will usually get a few sales - just be aware that anything that can be pirated will be pirated.

The largest chunk of our income came from direct sales. About 10% of the people playing our game paid for it (the rest pirated), which ended up coming out to about 10k after Google's cut, split between the three of us. We ended up making way more from the Flash version, through the sponsorship model (a much more modern model, which takes advantage of piracy instead of trying to fight it).

[–]Apist[S] 0 points1 point ago

My game is single player but it will have in game leader boards. Is that something to go by? Thanks for all the information and your previous experience.

[–]Scramasaxe 3 points4 points ago

Advertising, but have a close button on the banner, which brings up a way to pay for it and remove the banner. Seems like the way a lot of apps are going.

[–]NeverQuiteEnough 2 points3 points ago

there are advertisements but there is also microselling. if your game is expansive enough you can sell cosmetic items and that sort of thing, while the game itself is free to play.

[–]ndchristie 5 points6 points ago

as a caveat, beware the allure of the zynga/tf2 model! it has the power to make, hands down, more money than any other, but to become more successful, one must first be just regular successful! By far the least risky way to establish a freemium game is to already have another revenue stream - from advertising, a previous title, or a power-user model (where others have a highly restricted "lite" version - while similar at a glance, this is very different from pure freemium, which assumes all users have a full version of the game and simply buy tiny additions). A dry-launch of a game intended to be funded purely by microtransaction is a bold and potentially dangerous move, even with savings or investment.

[–]NeverQuiteEnough 1 point2 points ago

I don't know what zynga is but you are absolutely right. microselling isn't a magical way to make money, it requires legitimate support and a legitimate game.

[–]Chronophilia 1 point2 points ago

Zynga made Farmville, and a bunch of other similar games.

[–]geebs61 4 points5 points ago

Zynga made Farmville, then re-skinned it a bunch of times and convinced old people and middle schoolers on Facebook that they were different games.

[–]Apist[S] 0 points1 point ago

Lets say I have custom bonus character skins that customers can buy for 50 cents. Is that a something they would pay for?

[–]DevRW 0 points1 point ago

People will and do all the time, provided your game is good and/or addicting.

[–]NeverQuiteEnough 1 point2 points ago

yeah totally. you should check out League of Legends, a super successful free to play game.

they have two things you can buy with money, new Skins for the characters and new Characters to play.

The skins are a great idea, everyone enjoys them.

Selling Characters was not a good idea. People who are willing to pay money have a powerful advantage in the game, as some characters are (unintentionally) more powerful than others and this is always changing with balance patches, as is the nature of the genre.

new characters can also be bought with ingame currency, accrued by playing games. characters shouldn't be sold, but selling things with ingame currency in addition to real world currency is an excellent idea. The biggest barrier to people buying stuff is getting into the shop for the first time, but if they are always buying stuff with ingame currency they will be familiar with the shop and constantly exposed to new shinies.

selling power with ingame currency isn't necessarily wrong, but you should never sell anything with power for real world currency.

I'm not sure if games without any social aspect are able to make sales this way. If you can create a game with a scoreboard that is displayed prominently, and have the player's avatar next to their score that could be all you need. If you do it that way, you should sell helmets, gloves, suits, shoes etc or whatever you can separately so that everyone has a distinct character. Little Big Planet might be able to give you some ideas there.

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