Thoughts on premium vs freemium vs ads
Okay, so my ideal world, all games are premium: you pay a price for the game, now it's yours and you never have to think about it again.
In the modern era, that's the guaranteed path to bankruptcy unless you have a marketing department to hype your totally different platformer game on Steam that is exactly like all platformer games from the 90's except you gave your character a cup for a head.
Freemium is a thing I have always disliked, because there is motivation from the developer to make the game "pay to win," which ruins gaming in the pure sense. Even if it's not pay-to-win, there's an issue with just being AWARE that players can buy resources, which taints the dev process somewhat.
I am liking ads so far because even though they interrupt gameplay... it's still a GAME, and no pay-to-win garbage. It's almost like "premium, but spread out."
Today I got a one star review that took exception to Keep having ads, and also complained that I seemed to have deliberately balanced the game to force gold buys.
The game balance was established when Keep was a premium game. I tacked on the freemium+gold buys after players were no longer willing to pay even 99 cents for a game, but made no adjustments to the balance whatsoever-- as far as I'm concerned, the gold buys are simply there to allow players to overpower themselves, for fun.
Ads, however, are here to stay. It looks like the whole "pay money for games" thing is now a past era for my class of no-marketing-budget indie, at least... and ads don't mess up gameplay. I am still considering putting in a "watch a bunch of ads now so you don't have to interrupt the game" mechanism for SKHD, and I might even fold that into Keep/Boneyard/Hoggy/Kitty.
So to bring this around to the main point, I am thinking right now that SKHD is going to not allow players to buy gold until they've won the game at least once (with option to enable/disable it in settings-- this will just turn on automatically after first win). Buying gold should be a perk for people who have won the game and now want to experiment or indulge themselves. This way, as I playtest/balance the game, there will be no knowledge that the player can just buy up some gold, and the initial game-- student difficulty-- run, will be "clean."
In the modern era, that's the guaranteed path to bankruptcy unless you have a marketing department to hype your totally different platformer game on Steam that is exactly like all platformer games from the 90's except you gave your character a cup for a head.
Freemium is a thing I have always disliked, because there is motivation from the developer to make the game "pay to win," which ruins gaming in the pure sense. Even if it's not pay-to-win, there's an issue with just being AWARE that players can buy resources, which taints the dev process somewhat.
I am liking ads so far because even though they interrupt gameplay... it's still a GAME, and no pay-to-win garbage. It's almost like "premium, but spread out."
Today I got a one star review that took exception to Keep having ads, and also complained that I seemed to have deliberately balanced the game to force gold buys.
The game balance was established when Keep was a premium game. I tacked on the freemium+gold buys after players were no longer willing to pay even 99 cents for a game, but made no adjustments to the balance whatsoever-- as far as I'm concerned, the gold buys are simply there to allow players to overpower themselves, for fun.
Ads, however, are here to stay. It looks like the whole "pay money for games" thing is now a past era for my class of no-marketing-budget indie, at least... and ads don't mess up gameplay. I am still considering putting in a "watch a bunch of ads now so you don't have to interrupt the game" mechanism for SKHD, and I might even fold that into Keep/Boneyard/Hoggy/Kitty.
So to bring this around to the main point, I am thinking right now that SKHD is going to not allow players to buy gold until they've won the game at least once (with option to enable/disable it in settings-- this will just turn on automatically after first win). Buying gold should be a perk for people who have won the game and now want to experiment or indulge themselves. This way, as I playtest/balance the game, there will be no knowledge that the player can just buy up some gold, and the initial game-- student difficulty-- run, will be "clean."
Comments
I wonder if you would not have been able to put out the game at a 1.99 and have it rocket up the charts based on that? Would it have been worth it or do you stand by your decision? I have no idea how much ad revenue you get from these ads. Do you make on average more than 1.99 per person?
I ask because maybe was Boneyard you should take the approach that are tons of people waiting excitedly and eagerly for Boneyard and the hype machine is in place from their previous experience. I know I would definitely unhesitatingly for premium version of Boneyard slap down a buck 99.
Personally I would prefer if the option to not make myself OP was in there so that I wouldn't be tempted to just cheat and never really get good. Would you consider it?
But my experience so far has been that UNLESS you have the resources (and this usually means a marketing team-- when you see all these youtube channels, etc, that look like homemade looks into a company's life, the odds are 95%+ that it's actually a marketing company brought in to run a whole campaign) then you simply vanish.
I *do* have a Solomon's following, God love 'em, but even with how much attention Solomon gets, I am still a VERY small fish. By way of example: Solomon's earnings, all together, is completely eclipsed by what Chuzzle used to bring in with all the hype and marketing of Popcap games behind it. It's like comparing Earth to the sun. Any mobile attention I have I would say I completely owe to being featured at Apple. Any game I ever did that wasn't featured was also like Earth to the sun compared to games that got featured.
So yeah-- I could be wrong, but I have reasons to believe what I believe.
But ads gives me a good way to combine premium with free... I will never refrain from putting a "kill ads" button in for people to be premium if they want to be. And after contemplating this, I think I will be adding a "disable freemium features" in to SKHD for the purists. This is the nice thing about ads, it's giving me the opportunity to bring back purism.
$45 is too risky for anyone to throw down on a game these days. There's been a LOT of garbage games out in that price range (for instance, some years ago, the remake of Gauntlet on Steam basically made it so I would never, ever pay $60 for a game again-- it was the most beautiful looking game of that type I'd ever seen, but the gameplay was as if you'd taken Solomon's Keep and removed virtually EVERYTHING).
So I don't feel it's right to ask people to gamble that much money in today's awful market. Also, I'm a very small company and I don't have venture capitalists breathing down my back to repay their investment, so I am happy to sell games at a reasonable rate.
>It could give a bad impression to people who are against money-mongering
Heh, yeah, I'm one of those people. :)
There's no question about it, people don't really want to pay for games, even if its only a dollar and even when its one of the most popular games around.
Beyond that, there's the issue of how you acquire powerups in a game. Its a question of time vs. money. If you have time, grinding through content to get your perks is great and means you save money. However, if you don't have a lot of time but you do have disposable income, it may very well be worth it to drop down some cash to acquire those same perks. I fall into the latter category these days. I would rather be able to drop some cash down for some superpowers rather than spend the time grinding for them. There's just too many other things I want to do with my time.
I think the way ads are handled in the Solomon games so far is a pretty sensible, standard way of doing things. Hard to imagine anyone giving 1 star ratings to these games unless its literally the person's first time playing mobile games. The only thing that really gets under my skin is when the ads are too long. 30 seconds is all I'll tolerate which is why I now have this dialog burned into my memory forever: "Hi this is a rewarded video test ad, nice job getting it loaded and displayed!"
Though I usually dislike the F2P model, ads coupled with IAPs to turn them off are perfectly okay with me. I don't really like locking cheats behind IAPs or ads, but at the same time, I'm not terribly bothered about it either. I'd never pay money to cheat, but watching ads for it is something I can tolerate.
So I don't have much of a problem with your current approach to mobile games. It's VASTLY preferable over the disgustingly exploitative tactics other developers rely on these days.
I think my biggest problem with microtransactions is that they usually grant you expendable content that you have to pay for again if it runs out. Since I like to replay old games every now and then, this presents a real problem for me. I don't want to spend money again just to relive my memories.
On the other hand, I don't generally have anything against one-time purchases. Like removing ads. I also would've been completely fine with paying a little for the ability to use ice magic in Keep like people originally had to. After all, it's a fairly substantial, yet by no means essential addition to the game.
When I first made Solomon's Keep free with "pay for gold" it started making quite a bit more money than it did when it was premium. I joked to people that people were willing to pay to play my games, but they were willing to pay even more to not have to play my games.
>Though I usually dislike the F2P model, ads coupled with IAPs to turn them off are perfectly okay with me.
The huge, huge, huge advantage of this to me is I don't have to compromise the game at all to account for freemium stuff. I.E. no need to add stupid gems or hearts or flowers that can be rarely found or bought to unlock whatevers... i.e. I won't have to wonder if I should be adding baby stuff to games any more just to earn a buck from every 500th customer.
Working on Cubic Castles REALLY put a bad taste in my mouth about that. The ONLY time the game would self-finance was if I did nothing but make new hats and clothes for players to buy. It feels like depravity of the human soul.
But with ads... It can be just a game. Put ads at appropriate gameplay breaks, learn to live with the one star reviews ("this game isn't completely 100% free!! One star! Zero stars! Negative one stars!") and you can write games like the PC classics of ye olde days and still make money. I kinda consider the ad version to be the "demo" and the kill ads button is the actual "buy this game!"
Next up... Solomon Warcraft!
I'm also not surprised you didn't like Cubic Castles' approach to the F2P model. When you integrate microtransactions into a game's core design, I can definitely see there being a constant risk of monetization becoming so much of a focus that it consumes the game as a whole and drowns out more interesting, but less commercially efficient ideas.
Well, I expect to see the new Solomon RTS soon :) since warcraft is rts game... hehe JK
P.S. still though it would be cool to see a prequel game about the great mage war in solomon universe.
The thing about Cubic Castles was... the game was supposed to be a sort of "Make your own legend of Zelda" game... people would make Legend of Zelda style games, they'd all link together on a big world, and much fun would be had by all (that's why the overhead view-- it was supposed to be Link To the Past GameMaker).
But over time, the spec began to warp and skew and we released early simply because we needed SOME money coming in... the Steam launch was disastrous (it took the server completely down) and after that, nothing we tried except making geegaws and doodads for players ever generated any money. Boonka was a more disastrous project for me, but not by much.
One day-- far in the future-- I will probably give it another shot, alone, because I think the core concept of "everyone builds a big adventuresome world together" still sounds like fun.
All three of us on the team were veteran indie game makers... none of us got into Cubic Castles to create a dress-up chatroom. Somehow it just ended up there (when you have three people, it's a lot harder to stop, realize you're going in the wrong direction, and change course).
>as long as we're not drawing shapes on the screen to cast spells i am happy lol
God, I hate that gimmicky magic mechanic. Know a great game that ruined itself by including stuff similar to that? Legend of Grimrock.