Chapter 11

Making Money with Your Game

In This Chapter

Checking out your competitors

Understanding different monetization methods

Choosing the monetization method that’s best for your game

You’ve got a great game design, the tools to implement it, and it’s nearly ready for publication. If you took the long view before you started designing, you thought about whether you wanted to try to make money from your game, or even start a fledgling business. Maybe you just want to make games for fun and share them with the world for free. But if you do want to try to monetize your game, the first thing to do is to know the market — ­especially your direct competition. Then you can decide the best way to monetize your specific game and implement a plan to do so. In some cases, this means using a third-party SDK to serve ads in your game. In others it means using the Android SDK, though some methods don’t require any additional code at all.

But first things first. How (or even if) you decide to monetize may come down to an assessment of what else is already in the marketplace, so that’s where we’ll start.

Knowing Your Competition

The very first thing to do is to fire up Google Play (play.google.com) in your favorite web browser. Figure 11-1 shows a snapshot of Google Play as of this writing.

Google Play used to be called the Android Market, but recently Google rebranded the market and consolidated it into a one-stop shop for many other types of digital media, including books, music, movies, and television shows.

In general, this move is good for the typical Android developer, because it means there are other draws that bring customers to the marketplace. Users may visit Google Play looking for a new song, and in doing so may come across an interesting-looking app to try out (yours!). Android apps have their own subsection of Google Play; click Android Apps to browse the various game categories.

Viewing the top-ranked games in a given category (such as Brain & Puzzle) will give you an idea of what’s popular in that category. You can go one of two ways with this information:

Adopt a strategy of jumping on the bandwagon.

Take the road less traveled and make a game that is less likely to compete directly with popular existing games.

If you have a very specific game in mind, such as a variant of a popular game, use Google Play’s search functionality to see if one or more versions already exist. For example, a current search of “crazy eights” returns at least half a dozen versions of the game (including a Christmas-themed one!). You may decide that if the market is already too crowded with versions of the game you want to implement, you should try something else.

If you do want to go head-to-head with existing games, be aware that they’ve already got a huge head start on you. They may already have built up a significant and loyal user base. You’ll want to look closely at the listing of each competitor’s game in Google Play. Figure 11-2 shows the current listing of my game Golf Solitaire Free.

When looking at your potential competitor’s listings, pay particular attention to the following points:

The rating for the app.

This app has an average rating of 4.3 stars, which is very strong.

Number of ratings and installs.

Very few people take the time to rate and/or comment on an app, so the number of ratings is always a small fraction of the overall number of people playing the game. A large number of ratings means the game is popular. With 1,862 ratings and between 100,000 and 500,000 installs, this is an indication that the game is solidly popular. Not one of the elite 1 percent, but very solid.

Date of most recent comments and/or updates.

The graph indicating how the game is trending (that is, are the downloads recently increasing or decreasing).

Unfortunately for me, Golf Solitaire Free is trending downward most recently, but such an indicator can be good for you if your competitor’s game is waning; it might show you an opening.

Besides looking at the individual listings for your competitor’s game, you have one more obvious and necessary task: downloading and playing their games! You might find some competing games so professional and polished that you decide (as an individual or small team developer) that you might not be able to make a competitive product. More often than not, though, you’ll find many games with bugs or deficiencies, and you might decide you can make a better game. Read through the user comments to get an idea of specific complaints or feature requests. If you can give people what they want, you might just win them away from the competition.

I’ll end this section with a case study: my multiplayer crossword game WordWise. Figure 11-3 shows screenshots of the title and play screens for the game.

In early 2010, I realized that there was no multiplayer crossword game of this kind for Android. Words With Friends was incredibly popular on the iPhone, and its fans were constantly asking if and when a port to Android was coming. I thought that if I moved to fill the void quickly, I could build up a loyal user base and scoop competitors entering the Android market late with a game of this style. I developed the front end while a friend and fellow developer implemented the server.

We released the Android version in May 2010 and the iPhone version later that year. We were indeed the first on Android with this style of game, and the first cross-platform version as well. Revenue was strong for about six months. We encountered competition from a rival app called WordFeud, but we had built up a loyal user base that liked some features of our app better. We had focused less on the social aspect of the game and built it for slightly more serious players. Most games of this type allow endless attempts at making correct words. We gave the players two chances at making a legal play. Failing to make a legal play in two attempts resulted in a forfeited turn.

Everything went reasonably well until Words With Friends was finally ported to Android in early 2011. Our revenue flatlined overnight. As independent developers, we were not able to compete directly with a product that had worldwide name recognition, a built-in audience of millions on the iPhone platform, and a huge marketing budget.

However, WordWise wasn’t a waste of time or effort. By identifying a gap in the market, we were able to do reasonably well for about a nine-month period. We knew all along that there was a danger that a much larger competitor would land in the market and blow us out, but that was a risk we decided to take. WordWise is still on the market, though it no longer makes any significant revenue. We leave the server up for existing players, but don’t actively update the product since it is no longer profitable.

If I had it to do all over again, I would have stressed the social aspect of the game more aggressively, implementing sharing and chat features from the first implementation. If you end up working on multiplayer games, don’t underestimate the power of social interactions in spreading the popularity of your game and making it a more cohesive player experience.

The really important thing to note about this example is that we were aware of the absence of a particular type of game in the market and an existing demand. We exploited that knowledge to develop a game that performed well for a decent stretch of time, making it worth our while to implement it. Now that Android is a much more popular platform than it was in 2010, finding gaps is more difficult. Android has also drawn the attention of major game-industry heavyweights. So competition is much fiercer than it once was. That doesn’t mean you still can’t make a hit game, just that it’s more difficult than it was just a couple of years ago.

As of this writing, Google’s management of the market has also made it more difficult for smaller developers to get seen. New and updated apps used to show up in a Just In category, but because of abuse (some developers were publishing meaningless updates just to get an app bumped to the head of the queue), Google eliminated the category. For now, the market favors popular ports of existing games from other platforms, or games published by companies with multi-million dollar marketing budgets.

Your best bet is to search for existing games of the kind that you like to play:

If either you can’t find a game exactly like what you want, or the current crop just isn’t very good, that situation might signal an exploitable spot in the market.

Instead of competing with the game-industry giants, you can also look for regional or specialty games that might have been overlooked.

For example, I live in Louisiana, and there’s a popular card game specific to this area called Boo-Ray (bourré, in French). As of this writing, I can’t find a Boo-Ray app on Google Play. The audience would be small, but it would likely also be enthusiastic.

Just come up with a game concept so original and thrilling that it blows everyone away and becomes the next big hit.

No matter what your strategy, if you’re going for the big time, you have to decide how you’re going to make money from your game — and you have lots of options.

Monetization Models

Finding the right monetization strategy for your game may be more of an art than a science:

In some cases, a particular model stands out as a perfect fit for a particular type of game. For instance, in-app purchases are particularly well suited to games with lots of items and upgrades, such as farm simulators or role-playing games.

Most of the time, the best way to make money from your game may not be glaringly obvious.

Nothing says these models are mutually exclusive. I’ve done reasonably well with a mixed model — releasing free, ad-based versions of most of my games along with a paid, ad-free version. Throughout the discussion of the various models, if you have a particular game in mind that you want to develop, think about which model(s) would be the best fit.

Approach monetization from the perspective of the player. Would you click an ad if it was related to something you were interested in? Or would ads simply annoy you? What would get you to spend money on a game, or within a game? What method is the best fit for your game?

Free

The first option is to give your game away for free.

Wait . . . what?

How do you make money from something that you’re giving away? Stay tuned: The next few sections talk about “free” games that aren’t really free because they can

Try directly (within the game itself) to upsell the user to a paid version.

Serve ads that attempt to generate revenue.

Sell virtual goods that cost real money. This is known as the “freemium” model.

Keep in mind that a game doesn’t have to directly solicit money from the player in order to generate revenue.

The first game you make, unless it’s the most mind-bendingly awesome game in the world, you should release for free. Why?

If you’re new to game programming, it’s unlikely that you’re going to hit a home run the first time you step into the batter’s box. More than likely your game will be a bit rough around the edges, though hopefully it’s still very good. When you release a game for free, with no strings attached, it’s going to get a lot more downloads and see a lot more play. That in turn will give you a lot more feedback on what you can improve.

It’s going to build up a user base, hopefully one that will seek our future games that they will be willing to fork out money for.

If you think you’ve got a hit on your hands, by all means monetize your first game right out of the chute. But if you’re new to the whole game, releasing that first game for free, without a monetization method but to gain experience, just might be the best plan.

Paid

The most obvious way to try to make money from something is to sell it! In Chapter 12, when I talk about publishing through Google Play, you get a look at how to set the price of an app upon publication. Google automatically handles conversion into foreign currencies for countries where your game will be available for sale.

If you’re going to sell games, you need to be aware of sales tax issues. Sales tax law for Internet sales and digital goods is still a pretty murky subject, so if you’re in doubt at all, consult your local government authority, legal counsel, and/or a CPA. Google Checkout treats you as the vendor, not Google, so for sales in the US, they aren’t collecting sales tax. You may need to collect and remit sales tax to your state or municipality.

The two main questions you need to figure out are (a) whether you should offer a paid version of your game, and (b) if so, how much will you charge? Paid apps and games are going to have a much smaller audience. People will be much more willing to download something without the expense or hassle of paying for it. So the number of people playing your game will be smaller than it would have been if you’d released the game for free.

When people do pay for something, their expectations are higher. It’s a general phenomenon that paid versions of apps and games have higher average ratings than their free counterparts. This seems a little strange at first glance, but it seems that people tend to perceive something as having higher quality if it was more difficult to obtain. This attitude also means that your users may demand personalized customer support, and they may request additional features or changes to the game.

Okay, you should try to develop good standing with your user base when you can. You may get unreasonable demands, even some harsh criticism, but try to use that feedback to make your current and future games better. Overall you’d be surprised how worked up some people can get over something they paid less than a dollar for, but it certainly happens!

Speaking of which, what are you going to charge for your game? Big-budget console games go for up to sixty dollars these days. People are certainly willing to spend a significant amount of money on entertainment and gaming. But something of a double standard is at work when it comes to mobile apps. Many developers, particularly for the iPhone market, have complained of a “race to the bottom”: In a bid to be competitive and undercut others on the market, many games (even very high-quality ones) have priced themselves down to the minimum, 99 cents. This has almost led to the perception that one US dollar is right around the standard expected price for a paid game.

The minimum price for an app on Google Play is $0.99 USD

The maximum price is $200 USD.

You may not want to go quite as high as the max, but you may not want to simply default to the minimum. If you do, you may be undercutting yourself.

With my first few games, I experimented with price points ranging from $0.99 to $2.99. I typically ended up settling on $1.99:

I tended to get more sales when the price was lower, but not enough to make up for the price cut. Remember, you have to sell twice as many games at $0.99 as you do at $1.99 for that price point to make sense. That wasn’t the case for me, so I stuck with the slightly higher price point.

Of course, $2.99 seemed to be more than most people were willing to pay, and my sales dropped dangerously low. Don’t be afraid to experiment a little.

You can’t toggle between an app being paid and free in Google Play:

If at any time you designate your app as free in the market, you cannot then make it a paid app.

You can change a paid app to free, but once it’s free, it will always be free (unless you rename the package and completely republish it).

Free-to-Paid

A very popular model for monetizing games is to release a free version of the game with the intent of selling a paid version of the game. Many of the earliest games for personal computers used a shareware model, with copies of the software distributed for free, usually with a pitch for the user to buy a full licensed version.

However, within this model, there are several possible options for monetization, including:

The free version links to the paid version in the marketplace.

The free version allows conversion from within the game (via an in-app purchase) to unlock itself into the full version.

The game is actually the full version, but users may be prompted to send the developer money via a donate feature.

I’ve never heard of this method being used successfully, though that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been. I’m just including it here for completeness.

Keep in mind that these techniques are not mutually exclusive. Figure 11-4 shows the title screen of my free version of Golf Solitaire.

This version monetizes three ways:

Ads

Upselling to the paid version

Promoting other games

In Figure 11-4, the “Play 18 Holes” button is grayed out. The full version of the game includes all 18 holes. By teasing the user with this functionality, the phantom button provides an incentive for the user to buy the full version.

This is a somewhat controversial design. For example, when we tried to publish this version in the iTunes marketplace, the app was rejected, because Apple does not allow non-functional UI elements.

This title screen also includes a button that links to the full, ad-free version of the game in Google Play. The following code snippet shows how to link to another app in Google Play.

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW,

Uri.parse(“market://search?q=pname:com.golfsolitaire polyclef”));

try {

     myContext.startActivity(intent);

} catch (Exception e) {

}

The preceding code snippet explains how an active link to Google Play is made:

First you need to create an intent of the type ACTION_VIEW.

The second parameter is a link to parse, in this case a market query with the package name com.golfsolitaire and the publisher polyclef. We then call startActivity() from the current context, passing in the new intent.

This code will launch Google Play with the search parameters we specified, displaying the full version of the game. You’ll want to include similar code attached to a button’s click functionality or your screen’s onTouch() method.

Deciding what functionality to include?

Typically you want to give the player enough of a taste to decide whether they like the game enough to buy the full version. This normally means the first few levels or rounds of a typical game.

Another option, which I’ve never personally used, is time-based (that is, letting the player play the game for a fixed amount of time).

I’d recommend free-to-paid as a strategy. A free version of a game will see many more downloads than a purely paid one, so you’ll get a lot more exposure. And hopefully a good amount of that exposure will lead to conversions to the paid version of your game.

Ad-based

Using ads to monetize your game is another popular strategy. There are several appealing reasons to use ads:

As mentioned earlier, free games get a lot more downloads, and thus more exposure and play.

Software piracy is a problem; just how big a problem is controversial, and you can find arguments on all sides. But ads neatly sidestep the issue of piracy. In fact, you may even want to upload your game to a torrent site if it’s got ads in it!

Several mobile market research studies have indicated that Android users are less likely to pay for apps than their counterparts on other platforms. This is probably in large part due to the wide penetration of Android across all demographics. In any case, people do like free content, and an ad-based solution might fit the bill.

Ads don’t come without risks, though:

Just as with ad blockers for the web, users may find a way to keep your ads from displaying, though you’ll find most won’t care to go to that trouble.

Another potential problem just has to do with how much money you can expect to make. Just as in the early days of Internet advertising, the first couple of years of mobile advertising saw a big influx of advertisers, and thus revenue.

Unlike the situation on the web, however, ad providers haven’t done nearly as good a job at targeting ads to users of games, so (at least in my experience) the returns are not nearly what they once were. That doesn’t mean you can’t still make money from an ad-based game, but you’re probably going to need the game to have hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads if you want to make a full-time go at mobile game development.

Ads in mobile apps and games make money the same way that web-based ads do

Per impression (when an ad is simply viewed)

Per click (when the user actually clicks on an ad)

By far more money is made per click.

Be careful about how and where you place ads, or you’ll end up hurting yourself and the mobile-ad business as well:

You don’t want to place ads near UI elements so that the ads may be accidentally clicked. These “spurious” clicks may earn you a little more money in the near term, but since they are accidental, they don’t help the businesses that placed them. And worse, you may draw lower user ratings from players, or even get the attention of Google.

Violating the market’s policies can get you a warning or even have your app pulled or your account suspended. Even though Google is less restrictive than most other mobile markets, they still have content guidelines you need to adhere to:

play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

The technical aspects of integrating ads into your games are usually pretty easy and straightforward. Each ad provider will supply you with a downloadable SDK with instructions about how to integrate its service into your game.

If you want to use more than one ad provider, I’d suggest AdWhirl, which is known as an ad mediator, a service that lets you use multiple ad providers in a single app and control the ratio of ads served by each provider. You can also serve up house ads, banner ads that promote your own games. You can either

Promote other games that you have on the market

Contact fellow developers to promote each other’s games.

In-app Purchases

When a user makes a financial transaction within your app or game, this is known as an in-app purchase.

The two main uses of in-app purchases with regard to games are to

Upgrade from a free version to a paid version within the same app.

Purchase additional levels.

Purchase virtual goods.

Different markets or services may have different policies regarding how in-app purchases are used, so be sure you read the guidelines!

Some games are going to be natural fits for in-app purchases, such as RPGs (which have lots of in-game items like weapons or armor that could easily be offered for potential purchase). Sometimes you want to be creative when it comes to monetization, but you also don’t want to just jump on the bandwagon because other game companies have had success with a given method, especially if it doesn’t really fit into how your game plays. Don’t shoehorn in-app purchases into your game to an irritating extent (for example,

I don’t recommend making people pay extra for a queen in chess!), but you may want to integrate in-app purchases into your design if it comes naturally.

Alternatives to Google Play

Google Play isn’t the only way to distribute Android games, though it is the most popular. The reason is that when people get an Android device and go looking for content, they are usually going to take the path of least resistance — and that means using the market that’s preinstalled on their device. In most cases, that’s Google Play, but third-party markets exist as well.

As of this writing, the second largest market for developers is Amazon’s App Store. They’ve successfully entered the tablet market, which enables them to sell lots of devices with their own app store preinstalled.

Uploading and maintaining your games on multiple markets can be a pain, especially if those markets have different requirements for promotional resources like icons, banners, and descriptions. But you just might find that it’s worth your while if you put in the effort. Chapter 12 walks you through creating a developer account on Google Play, as well as uploading and updating your app there. But don’t forget that you have options.