hold on, maybe I am a little in the dark. What apps can you name are paid that have switched to having ads in them? I can't think of a single one - doesn't mean there aren't any, just none high-profile enough that I have noticed it so far. I can understand why people would be unnerved by that.. however I personally am planning to add IAP to existing paid apps I have released, and though I know it will probably anger a few people on principle, I feel like it's a waste if I don't otherwise (my app has been DLd over 300k times, and I've probably seen about $3k off of it, after free promotions and etc)
I think adding IAP to your game would be ideal if your talking about adding new levels, or something like that; especially, after 300k downloads. You're right it would be a waste unless you just wanted to keep giving things away for free. I think I was made to seem like a IAP/freemium hater, but that's really not the case if people would read my posts. How can I be a hater when my degree will be for Electronic Media, Marketing, and Public Relations. Every developer I've personally talked to or helped out, I mentioned these models.
I think that the only definable issues mentionned so far are: - People having to pay for something they already had access to in the past - People aquiring a full version, through a paid or free meaning, then suddenly having ads showing up, as if they no longer had access to the full version.
The first was a problem with freemium games where you buy the full app from inside. I actually like this method because it helps to prevent piracy. I guess all the issues weren't ironed out. Also your, the devs, comments have helped clear some things up! The second, I don't have too much experience in. I do remember this happening to the dictionary.com app when they updated. Sorry, if my previous comments were out of line, as I never meant for any of that to go down. I was looking a an overall picture and posted the link as reference. I thought it was important; maybe not.
We're both only trying to help, but misunderstanding comes easily in such a reccuring and sensitive subject and things can easily degenerate...
HotGen recently did this with To-Fu and Spacelings. Big banner ads at the bottom of the game, during gameplay. I paid for the game and immediately deleted it after the update, the ads made it unplayable (and I am not the kind of person who complains about "ads" in a pause screen like in Angry Birds, I also don't have an ad blocker in my browser, so I'm really not completely against ads on principle). I also don't think I'll ever buy from this company again, but I also realise that a company that does this probably doesn't care at all about that. There are many more games that did this, like Snuggle Truck and Time Geeks, but they did find a way to make it ad-free for customers who paid. I think this may be easier for them since they put in the ads immediately when it went free, probably with one of the methods mentioned earlier in this thread. So, they did not have hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded it for free on a promotion after which it went paid again. I assume that when you delete the game it will no longer recognize you as "paying customer" but this is still loads better than the HotGen way. If you want to do this with your games, at the very least make it clear in the update description that the update introduces ads. HotGen just said "IOS5 compatibility and bug fixes", which just adds to the bad taste this left for many.
It's a slightly different model, but for Astraware Sudoku (originally published through Handmark) and Sudoku Of The day (published on our own account), we made Sudoku of the Day freemium - gave the daily puzzles available for free and then had ads and in-app purchase items which allowed users to remove ads, buy a pack of puzzles, or unlock all of the features in Astraware Sudoku. That way new users could have the free games and choose to buy if they wanted. For existing purchasers of Astraware Sudoku, we encouraged them to move to Sudoku Of The Day via a button in the game. Because they had come from the paid version to the freemium version it detected the paid game and unlocked all of the features they'd had before. Any dev that wanted to go from a paid game to a freemium model could do something similar for their existing users. It just requires a small update to the original version of the game (and varying the game title slightly).
