Some fun (or not so fun) stats on the popularity of free to play on TouchArcade

I think people forget that Touch Arcade is also a business and needs to pay peoples wages. I remember people moaning about all the Flappy style articles earlier in the year, but the thing is, if that's what people are searching on google for then it makes total sense to post articles on that topic. It's so easy to ignore articles that don't interest you, usually the title is a big hint, in fact it takes more effort to open the article and then complain about the article in the comments. It's weird in my opinion.

 

I really like the Warhammer Quest pay model. $5 for the initial game. Then pay to purchase new in game content as they made it available. I felt this was fair.

I'm glad this thread was created. It's good to hear straight from the devs their feelings on f2p... it's an eye opener.

 

It depends on your expectations. Unless you get some sort of random runaway thing a la flappy bird, you might not get 100 downloads a day with a 1%-5% conversion. Probably won't tbh. That's casting no aspersions whatsoever, all non-mega-hits do those kind of numbers unless you advertise or get viral or make something big enough to get talked about on websites. (If you're making a smaller game, there's a few hundred of those released daily, really.)

Similarish to yours. It's complicated as for some games there were six people getting cuts or wages, others just one or two. We try to max out all six of us busy on something so need about $20K a month for wages, taxes and other expense like kit and rent.

Try this:
http://www.continue-play.com/feature/opinion/developer-blog-rubicon-development-on-market-visibility/

 

I've got a good network when it comes to gaming press. Was once editor-in-chief of Official PlayStation Magazine myself and have been building a network of mobile press and boardgame fans for years. The Free version of our game, which will be released later on, is just to give all those who stayed on the fence a second change. But I know that after your media attention is over, you're pretty much down to a few $ a day income-wise. My only goal is building a name for Monkube. The big succes will follow, one day, if we don't screw up a game along the way.
Thanks for the link. Interesting read.

 

Question: What kind of site would you like TA to be personally? Is the reality now different that what your own ideal is? And why?
(I think about this a lot as a dev. The only reason we're somewhat close with the stuff that carries the Monkube brand, is because we do another 2/3rd work for hire. So I'm certainly not complaining. Among mobile press, TA has always been an example of what a big iOS site should be).

 

I was listening to a recent episode of Accidental Tech Podcast, and they were talking about Crossy Road, and how they were all addicted to it, but hadn't spent any money. They were laughing and joking about how the developers really SHOULD have put some sort of pain point in there - ads, timers, something like that - because of the massive amount of money they were leaving on the table. The hosts were almost talking about the developers like they were stupid.

Well next week, it's time for followup. The developers of Crossy Road got in touch with them, and said that they specifically developed the game from the very beginning to NOT be sleazy, and they hate it when developers do that crap, and they have moral standards, etc. Also, the game had already grossed seven figures.

Something for indie developers to consider. Success without doing terrible things is absolutely possible in the App Store, even in the world of free to play.

Flappy Bird was also one of the single biggest stories in the history of mobile gaming, both financially and in terms of the possibilities of indie developers. It would have been neglectful if they HADN'T covered it.

I think this is perfectly fair, and is a direct way to finance future development. However, remember everyone lost their minds when Monument Valley - one of the best iOS games of all time - tried to do the exact same thing. Luckily that story got a bit of mainstream traction on Daring Fireball and The Loop, and the voices of the idiots were drowned out by more rational heads. Indie devs can't count on that.

That's sad, I love those types of articles. And I don't particularly care for anything about PocketGamer; some of the dumbest articles and editorials I've ever read about iOS have been on that website. I really don't get the impression they like Apple much over there.

 

The problem is financial viability is wildly different depending on how you structure your business. If you're a one man studio doing a project on the side, then sure, premium is super viable because you don't have much to lose. Similarly, if you're commanding an ultra-niche market like the the Hunted Cow guys are that can also work. There's few situations outside of that where premium makes sense, and the people who choose to argue otherwise are willfully ignoring the mountains of real-world developer accounts posted on Gamasutra and similar where developers have tried everything to make it work and it just doesn't.

People largely won't pay for things on the App Store, and when they do they feel developers are beholden to them for eternity to continue offering free content, updates, and other support. Similarly, when your paid game inevitably bombs, your only remaining promotional tool is lowering the price, which often only serves to piss off the people who originally shelled out whatever you felt your initial reasonable asking price was.

Like it or not, free to play solves all of these problems. Your potential profitability is way higher since the people who want to spend money can spend as much as they want, people who will never spend anything don't have to, and there's an entire auxiliary industry revolving around all the things you can do to promote or otherwise boost the success of free to play games.



Fortunately, or unfortunately, that kind of thing just isn't as interesting to me as the other indie stuff we've traditionally covered... But it is a very real reality that free to play content very much pays for our ability to post about the niche indie stuff that the more vocal members of our community are into. We're not posting this stuff to provoke the now traditional reaction of "LOL JUST DELETE IT THAT'S HOW YOU WIN FREE TO PLAY," we're doing it so we can keep posting about things those people care about.

Yeah, I know all about the race to the bottom, all that stuff.

Ultimately, what I think a lot of people don't understand is that the problems of the App Store are Apples. Not yours. Not developers.
The developer's job is to create something people want to play, and do it at a profit, so they can feed their families. The job of a site like TouchArcade is to write about the games people are playing, and about related content that the gaming audience finds interesting. That's all - developers and writers don't make the rules, they're just players in the game.

Apple makes the rules. They determine the business models that find success or failure. They allow massive price drops at the discretion of the developer. They allow a top list that encourages flash sales and user acquisition. They allow third-party ad services that harvest information. They allow apps to include endless spending caps on consumable items. The list goes on and on, and you may not agree with all of the items on it, but the fact is, Apple is the only one who can make a meaningful difference in the quality and style of the apps that find success in the App Store.

People shouldn't be outraged at websites for writing about things. They should be outraged at Apple for creating an App Store that encourages sleazy, manipulative, and shallow games. Or they shouldn't be, if they're libertarians who think the free market should be the only important determiner of success and failure.

That is still something I'm not sure of. Free to Play reaches a huge audience, for sure, but how much of that audience is likely to visit a game website / forum? Are middle-age ladies who are addicted to Candy Crush going to start posting on web forums about it in droves, just because a site is focused on that sort of thing.

I don't know what numbers you have, I'm probably not in any place to talk about it. But I just have a feeling that a site in the style of TouchArcade - forum plus homepage - focused around free to play might not do nearly as well as the numbers suggest. The Venn diagram between forum enthusiasts and f2p gamers probably doesn't overlap to the degree people would expect.

I mean, look at the other iOS gaming forums out there. Or don't, because nobody ever posts in any of them. If the mobile gaming forum audience was so huge, I'd imagine SOME other forum besides TouchArcade would have SOME level of success. The same is true for websites, come to think of it. PocketGamer seems successful, but what about the other sites I used to read in the early days of the App Store? I won't name names, but a heck of a lot seem to have folded.

I don't know, I have a feeling there is an interesting conversation to be had about this topic. But there is so much I don't know about audience interest in this type of thing, I feel a bit out of my element.

 

If all the money drained from the mobile game biz by User Acquisition ad networks would stay with devs, you'd have the budget to do all that ;-)

And the Evil Wizard thing is just the way the world works. I once exposed a tripple A dev for bribing journalists for +95 scores at PlayStation Magazine (which nearly got me fired, by the way), and some readers where still convinced it was a diversion.

Just looked up the Adblock thing. Seems you've got a F2P-like problem as well. Is there no way for browsers to block/unblock on a per-site basis?

 

100% correct. I'm not saying that they should ban the bad stuff, but they should at least make an indie-only list, where you only find games from small, non-VC funded companies.

Removing all games you've already installed from the App Store lists would also help. Or moving everything which is older than X amount of months to a secondary list maybe?

There's lots of room for improvement. Maybe we should ask Rami from Vlambeer to convince them?

 

Oh my god, I remember Pocket Frogs... Can't believe that thread is still so active!

That second point is kind of what I was getting at. We have a new audience of people to whom forums aren't seen as much of anything. The people under 20 that I know just don't even see forums as part of the internet they're familiar with. Comments, sometimes. Reblogs, definitely. But forums seem to be seen as some sort of archaic leftover, the way someone my age would see Usenet groups. Heck, I have a hard enough time getting people I know under 20 to use email! So it doesn't surprise me in the least that you'd see a ton of traffic to regular articles about F2P, but that the audience those articles bring just don't care about commenting or visiting the forum to discuss those games.

I guess that begs the question: how critical are the TA forums to the level of success TouchArcade is experiencing these days? I'm sure the days where app sale commissions were enough to cover the site are long gone, but are the ad views associated with blog posts and the main page enough to cover things? Or are the type of multi-page-loading that forums lead to hugely important to ad sales?

If forums ARE critical to the site's profitability, and if casual gamers (and younger / older gamers) tend to avoid forums, that suggests a casual-focused site trying to do the same thing TouchArcade does might run into trouble - they can get a lot of action on the main page, but the forums are dead. Similarly, it would explain why some of the more hardcore-gaming iOS sites have folded or are dead - they get a hardcore contingent posting in the forums, but no action on their main blog from Google, because the vast majority of people don't care as much about "serious" games and such.

Even so, with all of this, I'm still shocked at the relative lack of iOS game discussion out there on the internet. I started posting on Reddit recently, and unless I'm missing something, it's a freaking wasteland when it comes to iOS gaming. Major "gaming" sites don't have a clue about mobile gaming. Major Apple sites don't seem to understand gaming or care about it at all (hey - just like Apple!). It seems odd, it seems like the audience SHOULD be there, but isn't.

 

Hey Eli,

Is your fancy site tracking picking up my repeated clicks and refreshing of Shaun's RPG Reloaded series over the past hour? Drop in the bucket maybe but hopefully those RPG features get some credit that it due.

Too bad there's no way for me to denounce my view of the Injustice guide; it was just the one time... I didn't inhale.