I make my living off of mobile freemium games. We don't do anything with replay timers or the like - we advertise, mostly, and have fun in-app purchases.
For a couple years we offered two versions of our apps - paid and free, free being ad supported. In a bid to simplify things and encourage more conversions, we switched to in-app purchase to get rid of ads. (Also, app stores had been optimized to push down app results for non-free games - plenty of reading out there about the causes and effects.)
To date, just under 5% of our revenue is paid. Despite playing for years, many people don't believe our games are worth $1.99. If you believe the race to the bottom will reverse itself, I'm here to tell you it won't. It's guided by the walled gardens and they like it this way.
We have had millions of downloads and on our most popular game, have abnormally long retention. Even some of our most die-hard players will not spend $1.99.
Maybe - MAYBE console gaming will one day return from F2P, but I doubt it. At least not in the near future - the industry is still moving towards it.
But in mobile gaming, success is a volume play. And the volumes won't part with $.99 in the traditional way. If they did, F2P wouldn't be a thing. And maybe gamers will pay for games, but the masses? Not so much.
I'm not what I would ever describe as a gamer. Well, I was massively when I was much younger in the arcade, 8 and 16 bit days but now, not so much/at all.
The problem I have with many freemium games is for me they have absolutely no lasting appeal. I would estimate that 75% of freemium games I've installed, I may have played a sum total of half an hour and then got annoyed/fed up/bored and removed it. Adverts, replay timers etc. are certainly to blame but what mostly is a turn off for games of these types is there is no soul in a lot of these games.
Take Triple Jump, Don't Step On The White Tile, Avoid The Blocks etc. for example(s). They're like Christmas cracker toys. You play them once or twice, discover how lame they are and throw them away.
While I realise those games aren't meant to be much more than that (and an SEO exercise), there are so many like these on the various app stores and few games that have any kind of depth to them. I would more than happily, and have happily, paid $1, $2 or more for a game that held my interest for longer than half an hour. The biggest problem I have is these throw-away games have been so cleverly marketed or SE-optimised that they make up the bulk of "featured", "highlighted" or "best selling" games and any game with a modicum of depth disappear into the ether, undiscovered. It's frustrating for someone who wants to play a fun, entertaining game, not an annoying, repetitive and uninspiring christmas cracker game.
This is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve with Curated[1]. The Play Store is filled with low-think, one-tap junk these days... Finding a good game on the Play Store is almost as hard as finding a science show on the Discovery Channel. It's optimised for the unthinking masses, which makes sense for Google from a monetary perspective, but for anyone interested in a deep game, then either Google's algorithm needs to get waaaay smarter or we have to do it ourselves.
>Maybe - MAYBE console gaming will one day return from F2P, but I doubt it. At least not in the near future - the industry is still moving towards it.
That's an optimistic statement almost bordering on naive. What the market seems to be moving towards is adding F2P mechanics to $60 games. GTA V lets you buy in-game money for the multiplayer mode. Mortal Combat X has easy fatality mode where you get the famous "fatality" animations after every game (costing $0.20 every time it triggers). Almost every AAA game on the market lets you change the look of your character for a few dollars.
For a couple years we offered two versions of our apps - paid and free, free being ad supported. In a bid to simplify things and encourage more conversions, we switched to in-app purchase to get rid of ads. (Also, app stores had been optimized to push down app results for non-free games - plenty of reading out there about the causes and effects.)
To date, just under 5% of our revenue is paid. Despite playing for years, many people don't believe our games are worth $1.99. If you believe the race to the bottom will reverse itself, I'm here to tell you it won't. It's guided by the walled gardens and they like it this way.
We have had millions of downloads and on our most popular game, have abnormally long retention. Even some of our most die-hard players will not spend $1.99.
Maybe - MAYBE console gaming will one day return from F2P, but I doubt it. At least not in the near future - the industry is still moving towards it.
But in mobile gaming, success is a volume play. And the volumes won't part with $.99 in the traditional way. If they did, F2P wouldn't be a thing. And maybe gamers will pay for games, but the masses? Not so much.