More free for a while games than ever and less premium

You need to buy them or the devs will give up on ios gaming and move to another platform. Not buying games and waiting for freebies doesn't help the scene at all.

I buy lots of games. Don't mind if there's a price drop a week or two after I buy a game. Happy to support the devs buying their games

The games are normally so cheap in the first place anyway

 

I agree, although I have to admit I check if there are freebies once in a while (best free games of the day)... who doesn't? But most of them aren't polished enough or are just too casual for me and I end up deleting them anyway. Sometimes they act like a lite version and I end up buying the full one later on, although that rarely happens. I like in-depth, RPG games so I don't mind spending above the average price. It's worth it.

And I swear Jetpack Joyride's been free for a really long time....

 

That comment is the reason and justification for freemium games.

 

Paper Monsters might be free now but it didnt use to be. I 'presume' they made a good chunk on the game to begin with and then offered it for free on that website deal for a week or so. But again if the people didnt buy it in the first place you wouldnt get it for free.

If more people buy Paper Monsters then we might get a sequel, if Paper Monsters doesnt sell that well then theres no chance of a sequel. Look at Terra Noctis, a great platformer but i think it didnt sell well thats why theres not many updates and they tried some other pricing models (eg freemium).

The problem is apps are so cheap anyway (Despite this people still wait for price drops !), if most games were 7 dollars a lot of people wouldnt be happy and would run a mile. The problem is everyones used to games being 99c or a dollar or two, even when a games 99c theyre still moaning about the lack of levels etc and updates despite the game being SO cheap.

But we're all used to cheap games on iOS, if all iOS games went up to 5-10 dollars i dont think it would work.

Its bizarre though as theres idiots, i mean people out there who pump lots of money into freemium titles, its crazy. They 'seem' to think the games free but pay a lot for IAPs

 

Devs do temporary sales for "free" mostly to just gain some word-of-mouth advertising. If a game isn't selling well, it's the easiest advertising (and free for them as well) they can get.

I buy games that I really want on a regular basis (probably way more than my wallet should be allowing). But I'll be the first to admit that I'll download a freebie if it's something I wasn't quite sure of. If it's something I really enjoy afterall, then it's giving me the heads up that "hey, this is a developer I need to watch" and I'll buy their next game.

I do hate when paid games go "free" too quickly, but unfortunately, a dev has to do what they have to do to generate a buzz.

What pains me more is when paid games go freemium. I know it's sometimes a choice a dev has to make just to make money. But almost always prefer paid games over freemium.

Heroes Call is a perfect example. Great game that is marred by the freemium model it uses.

Even though it's a big dev and a popular franchise, Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing may have started dwindling in sales. Making it free for a couple of days may help generate sales when it goes back to paid.

All I can say is that I try to financially support the developers that make good games.

 

I buy games cause I'm a nutcase.

 

Being a dev myself, I find it a really touchy and tough thing to discuss among the company. And really my company is just 3 guys trying to make it so they work for themselves rather than slave for others.

To give you a glimpse into the world of app pricing/paradigms, we brought out a puzzle game on iOS last October as a 'free' app that let you play the first 20 puzzles but then you pay 2 bucks for the next 80 puzzles. People were upset with it because a) we were put into a free app of the day promo and it wasn't completely free because Apple won't let IAP's be priced Free. Oops. And b) the first 20 levels weren't challenging enough for people to see the worth in the rest of the levels. Funny thing is the rest of the levels are challenging as hell.

Anyway, we switched to a price of a dollar to see how that sold. Results were better but still dismal. Then we updated the game and made it 160 levels. Sales rose a little but nothing substantial. We played with different pricing points and found premium pricing and sales drops were key to getting free exposure. But again it's nothing to live off of...in fact it's hardly what I would consider successful. But the market is full of kids without money, people without interest(casuals), and a lack of support from the actual stores. Too many apps too... I feel that there should almost be a dump category where all these crappy half assed apps that all the lottery players are into.

Again to give you a little more perspecting, we released the same game on Android and within a month or two Google chose our game as a staff pick and featured us on their store front. It made our sales balloon quite a bit. Let's say if you were selling 10 a day, this was more like 600 a day. The problem with this is it's all based on exposure. We received 50 5-star reviews in that time and 1700 Google+ recommends. But now that we've dropped off the staff pick list rotation, our sales have plummeted again. Exposure is massive... and since everyone pays attention to blockbusters now, the indie dev really has no chance unless they are a media darling.

Our friends, Get Set Games, released Mega Run which is a freemium app with a lot of IAP built in. It's #1 in 21 countries or something...it's depressing to see that a dollar is a major purchase hurdle for people. And the reason for that is because of the amount of choice. And the lack of presented choices in an exposed store front means we're all sinking without word of mouth. How can you get word of mouth if people are too busy talking about EA's next ipad game or the next Infinity Blade? They pour millions into those games and it's impossible to compete.

So free is the only way to get noticed in that paradigm. It is hell...and it causes a lot of arguments in terms of business theory among devs.

We have a new game in the works we are very proud of...but I'm worried it will be our last because after seeing how Kunundrum has done over the past year, there's absolutely, and I mean ABSOLUTELY no way we can continue to live off of NO profit.

Again, to reiterate the sales numbers, in almost 8 months of being on the iOS market, Kunundrum's sales have no been eclipsed by how much it's made off of Android within 2 weeks of being featured. But those figures don't add up to 3 people being able to live, let alone thrive to make another title.

 

So, you are the makers of Kunundrum. I downloaded that program for free about 6 months ago, and it was a fun game kind of like Quell, a game I liked. It's interesting to hear your perspective about the state of freenium games nowadays. I sure hope that in the future ios games don't go this route. And I hope that games like yours have a way to compete. Good luck in your new game that is coming out.

 

Awesome man! Thank you so much for checking it out and I hope you dug it!

Yeah we honestly didn't know about Quell when we made Kunundrum hahaha, however we did know about The Brainies on the SNES and thought that's a cool title to cut our teeth on.

However... wait til our next title comes out. I guarantee it will be a quality title with some pretty fun gameplay. We're not going to do the freemium thing with it. We want it to be a full fledge respectable title.

It's tough though... freemium = money and stability and agility. Normal titles, either you make the next amazing piece of software or you sit there and wonder where all these 250,000,000 phone users are hahaha

Still contemplating marketing initiatives to push the game, but with a VERY fragile base, it's tough to choose where you spend your money.

We're busy making the next title, and spending some cash on that one this time, so it's...more of a focus. Don't want to 'turn our backs' on a title we made, but when it's a buck or two and hardly selling, it's tough to find the logical next step.

The next one though....it's special to us. Pushing ourselves a little further this time

 

HTWgames, played about 15 levels of Kunundrum right now, and I have to say it looks great on my new ipad. I love these kind of puzzle games where it takes a lot of brain power to figure out how to get each ball into each home hole.

I like how the graphics really shine on the new ipad. It is nice having a ball the same size as ones fingertip, it really feels right when you flick the balls. Glad you sold this game well on the android marketplace.

So I'll bite, what is your new game about? Will it be a puzzle game, and any blog or pic links to it? By the sounds of it, sounds like it will be a high quality game.

 

Sweet, wait til you get into the later levels... those puzzles get pretty tricky! We're looking at building in a different solution to the 'solution tokens' however. At the moment a message pops up when you hit the amount of moves that equals about 1 star. And you can pay for solution tokens which play out in front of you. We're going to incorporate Youtube videos into that instead. So when you click on the solution button you get taken to youtube and you can look through the playlist if you're having trouble. It's an initiative to take the cost off the user and place it on ads. New experiement that will be coming out in an update hopefully soon...plus 10 more puzzles.

Anyway, onto the next game... at the moment we're holding our cards tight to our chest because this is the first time we've done something we think is of note. It is a free-runner, which insert groans here <ugh>, that will incorporate a mechanism you've seen before in some titles, but ours is offering 50 levels of unique gameplay, and then a bunch of endless modes. But the key thing about this title is apart from the gameplay being engaging, challenging and fresh(due to the design), we are leaning on some contracts to help make the cutscenes and the music of higher quality.

I know I talk about exposure a lot, and probably should roll out some stuff, but I'm not sure what to do really haha Most of the beta testers on the game, or people who've played it have said things along the lines of 'I think you have a gem here', or just kill the phone by playing it too much hahaha

We're hoping to release sometime this summer, possibly creeping into August...but that's a production situation we need to address. Like I said 3 guys, one of us still has a full time job, and it's a LOT of work.

Looking to release a trailer sometime soon with possibly an indiegogo.com public fund to help us cover costs. Don't want to get into logistics of tons of giveaways, just kinda wanna say hey we want to make this title, if you like it, donate We can only do about 50 ios giveaways, but can lean on the droid side since they don't limit the way you give your title away.

Believe me... I'm DYING to show it off. And really it's just because I'm proud of it, and also I'm a fan of the game. My coder showed me the design and I fell in love with it.

Could I be anymore vague?

 

Actually, I picked up Sonic Racing for free about a year ago. In fact, if anything, games used to go free (without iAP added since apple didn't yet have a method for properly processing them) for a very limited time more often in the past. The reason is that, previously, a game could go paid-free-paid and keep its total download statistics. So, if a game such as Temple run had gonefree than back to paid back in say, 2009 or 2010, it would dominate the paid charts instead of reverting to zero downloads. As far as I can remember, this all began with a site called the Advent Calender in 2009 or 2008, whichever was the adveritized a free game every day during the month of the first Christmas after the appstore opened shop. Heck, I still see some posters members here who;s games I snagged back then, like the dev of Libra Balance.