Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Business models
So you have an idea, you know the platform to develop it for, and you know the genre
and target audience of your mobile game. The next step is to decide how you will
make money out of it!
When releasing a game on the mobile market, there are several options available to
make it profitable. Deciding which business model to use is an important, and is a
tough decision that will affect the commercial success of your product. Let's invest
time in describing each of them and their pros and cons.
Premium
Premium was the predominant business model in the beginning years after Apple
launched its App Store. It means that users are charged an amount of money, usually
99 cents, to download a game. It is used by some of the most popular mobile games,
such as Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, or Cut the Rope.
Today, premium games tend to perform worse in terms of sales than games that are
offered for free or with in-game advertising. On February 2013, Minecraft was the only
paid app among the most downloaded 20 apps on the App Store. We suggest you
refer to such a business model only if you can provide some kind of unique, differenti-
ated contents, such as a game based on a popular license of some sort, for example,
a sports game or if your average gameplay session is generally so short that you can't
get advertising to work.
Freemium
Freemium means that you give away your game for free, planning to make money
through
In-App Purchases
(
IAP
) of virtual goods. It is the dominant business model
today, if you consider that of those 20 most profitable apps on the App Store, 15 are
Freemium games, including Clash of Clans, Zynga's Poker, and Bejeweled Blitz.
Freemium works best when your game delivers value over time or has the character-
istics of a viral product, which encourages free users to attract paid customers.
