Marketing and Monetizing - Beginning Android Games - page 646

ï?® Unmanaged items : Things such as virtual currency, coins, expendable
upgrades, entry tickets, and anything else that gets “used up� by the player
and needs to be “refilled.� Unmanaged items can be purchased over and
over again, adding to the existing number or amount. Unmanaged items are
also attached to the Google account, not to the device on which they are
purchased.
On top of that, you can also set up subscriptions that bill at regular intervals. Subscriptions
are seen by your game as just “on� or “off� at any point in time, so you can provide whatever
content, service, upgrade, or other feature you want while the player is subscribed.
The Google Play service for processing IAPs is called In-app Billing. The Google Play Developer
Console provides you with an interface for your game to set up your purchasable items. The
most compatible way to name your purchasable items is to use your app package name as the
prefix; for example, com.badlogicgames.awesomegame.300points would work for a 300-point
purchase.
So, what's a good strategy for setting up purchasable items? There is no clear answer because it
depends entirely on your game. One very effective strategy centers on using virtual currency for
everything.
Virtual Currency
Virtual currency (VC) is in-game money. Whether you call it gold, gems, rubies, coins, credits, or
a name you invent, VC is a number that your game stores for the player, allowing the player to
buy stuff. Your VC doesn't need to have a one-to-one relationship with real money, just a clear
relationship with the game. VC is nice because acquiring it becomes a primary or secondary
goal of the game, and you can utilize that goal to monetize your game. Without getting too deep
into the psychology of it, people seem to be motivated to buy VC because they either want a
shortcut in gameplay, enjoy personalizing their game experience or just like buying stuff.
VC, being one of the most popular types of purchasable items that games offer right now, is
commonly sold in tiered amounts, with discounts for larger purchases; for example, 100 points
for .99 cents, 500 points for $3.99, 5,000 points for $29.99, and so forth.
One good strategy that many game programmers use is to award VC for in-game actions, like
breaking a golden brick or winning a level. Some games have timed levels that award more VC
for beating the level in less time. Other games have multiple types of VC so that the programmer
can control how scarce one type of VC or the other is, forcing the player to choose between item
purchases and upgrades more carefully or to play more to get enough of one type of VC so that
they can purchase a particular upgrade or item. A common strategy is to make the game free,
allowing the user to collect VC and purchase things organically, but to also offer shortcuts and
cheats as IAPs, such as giving the player the option of advancing faster—basically, paying you
real money in exchange for being able to play through the game quicker or score a little higher.
This strategy and variations of it are very effective monetization tools indeed.
There are VC-related services, like TapJoy ( www.tapjoy.com ), that allow you to monetize your
game not just with VC, but by making offers to the user that pay the user with more VC. These
services offer incentives like “Install this other game and get 50 coins� or “Click on this ad