Do you make a decent amount of money with a free game with ppc ads? The user amount would be pretty big but, Does anyone actually bother to click on these ads? If so would it make more than selling an ad-free game at .99?
Paper Toss has around 7,000,000 (maybe more) downloads, so you have to download a lot to make a lot Also, Paper Toss has a lot of users that play the game more frequently (as opposed to a lot of other free games where players might play once and delete the App), so that helps increase the paycheck significantly.
To further expand on Backflip is you want to use them as an example, here's an article of the panel they gave: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/11/gdc-2010-backflip-studios-year-in-the-app-store/ While they did make a lot with ads (and probably due to the fact that they had 17M downloads of Paper Toss), what's interesting is they actually used their free game to promote their paid one and made even more money off of that. A free-to-paid strategy might be more beneficial to you (unless your free app gets over 10 million downloads, then def. put some kind of ads in there!)
Either approach can generate a good revenue if the apps are high quality and well-marketed. The important thing is to pick a business strategy that is right for your games (e.g. it's harder to stick ads into certain kinds of games). Games with ads need to have very high replay value... you need to have players play over and over for a long time in order to bring in revenue from the ads. We've developed a number of paid and free games, and our free games generally bring in more revenue than the paid ones.
Thanks for linking the article on Back Flip studio. Always very interesting to get some insight into how other companies are attacking the App Store. Paper Toss is a very simple yet very sticky game. My friend pulled it out on a plane and ended up passing it along 5 other friends for a full 2 hrs. Also got a few more of us to d/l it after we landed.
Wow, I didn't expect that, I thought that the free->paid strategy dominated, But I guess if you have enough people downloading your game then someone is bound to click on the ad. And wow, backflip with 1 mil off ads alone! I wonder what there ppc rate is? I have also noticed another strategy, it is a combonation of the two, where there is a free game, the devs bomb it with ads and if you want ad-free you have to buy the "ad-free version" does this strategy work or do the users get frusterated with the bombardment of ads and delete the app?
