Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Monetization models
You'll notice that I mentioned in-app purchases earlier, and different ways of selling
or making money from games. The race to the bottom has led to many developers
taking a different approach to profiting from their games. We'll take a look at three
models that you can use to make some money from your games.
The freemium model
The
freemium
model provides the game to the player for free, and instead makes
money by selling functionality or content inside the game itself. This has become a
popular model because it allows players to try the game and sell the game in parts, or
even sell the game for a combined value that is much higher than the game is worth.
To accomplish this in Windows 8, you would have to set the price of your game to
Free, and then use in-app purchases to unlock content for the player to use.
This model is great if you have a lot of modular content within a single game experien-
ce that can be sold separately, such as levels or episodes. You may also elect to cre-
ate an in-game currency that the player can use to buy this content or other bonuses.
Often, this will be done with coins that the player can buy in predefined bundles. Some
games will have two in-game currencies, one that can be acquired in the game, and
one that can only be bought. By offering content in both of these currencies, you al-
low players to get that content by playing the game a lot, which works for people with
plenty of time.
For those with less time, you can offer a cheaper deal that lets them get the content
with the special premium currency; however, they ultimately need to pay for it. Some
games will allow for conversion from the premium currency for use in the game. For
example, a city-building game might allow the player to buy extra resources to build
more, or they might allow the player to pay to accelerate the construction of buildings
and save time.
The traditional model
This model is what you're used to in most retail games, and the simplest. You set a
price up front, and the consumer pays that price to get the entire game. You can eas-
ily do this using the techniques mentioned earlier, and if you ever want to expand the
