
Freemium Regret on the App Store - kranner
http://noisytyping.com/freemium-regret/?version=1.1
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steve8918
30 free levels is still too much. You need to drop it to about 10 levels, and
then start charging. Level 10 is where you get a lot of people eager to keep
playing, and the rate of abandonment doesn't drop, so to me, this is the best
place to make them pay. If they won't pay at level 10, they won't pay at level
30.

And I think you are right, you are being nice. It's strange that you don't
want to use standard monetization techniques, yet you complain when you don't
make any money. It's sort of like the "nice guy" who gives everything to the
hot chick in class, and then when he asks her out, he's shocked when she
declines, saying that she wants to be friends.

There has to be a give-and-take between producer and consumer, and the best
producers know how to balance that properly.

If you give your users a good experience, then they should pay to support your
development costs. Saying you don't like pop-ups or you don't like ads is
frankly nonsensical for someone who is trying to make money. There are ways to
do both tastefully, and at this point, people realize that in-game ads are a
necessity of life for a free product.

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aptwebapps
Certainly by eyeballing the graph I'd say that ten is about right and 100 as
way too high. However, I wonder if there aren't other considerations. For
example, '10 Free Levels!!!' doesn't sound so hot.

The other thing is, if you lower it at all at this point you're going to get
at least a few whines in the comments.

Another approach would be to come up with a different kind of level and sell
those in a pack.

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kranner
I've saved the version number in NSUserDefaults, so anyone upgrading to the
next version will be able to keep their 100 levels (unless they deleted the
app in the interim).

That should help a little with the 1-star gang.

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jcampbell1
This game is a clone of "Flow", which has about the same amount of free
content, yet has generated several million dollars in revenue from in app
purchases.

I don't think this was a strategy error. 100 free levels is not too much when
each level only takes 10 seconds.

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brador
Do you have a link to any flow free revenue discussion? Google came up with
nothing.

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kevingadd
This game may also just be suffering from not being interesting enough to
convince people to buy. Setting the amount of free content lower may move the
'buy or not' decision earlier, and reduce dropoff, but it's still likely that
some percentage of your players just aren't engaged enough to pay after
already having played the game for a while.

This particular class of design problem mostly affects games, so it can be
kind of strange if you're used to developing software. A good way to think of
it is by looking at a program like a ringtone creator or icon editor: Very
often, you grab a ringtone creator or icon editor just to create one or two
ringtones or one or two icons. After that, you literally never want to use it
again (or at best, maybe you want to use it again 6 months later). The group
of people who use an app like that every day is vanishingly small. So, if you
build one of those apps and you give away a fully-featured version, most
downloads will never convert into purchases.

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eliajf
Wait. Are you really doing that badly? You are converting, I'd guess based on
your data, about 5% of your download base, which is actually very reasonable.
But you are losing like 25% immediately, so your conversion of active users is
actually quite higher, maybe 7.5-10%. You may be focusing on the wrong metric.
I would consider instead focusing on getting downloads higher.

Additionally, I wouldn't offer the bundle packs but instead sell everything
individually. I read a great article a few weeks ago on making in app purchase
work for games. (I write productivity apps.) One of the things they said was
have lots of ways for people to spend money. Only a small percentage of people
spend so you need them to spend a lot. The comment was that the best
performing games are generating upwards of $50/spending user, all via in app
purchase, all from like 1-2% of the download base.

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michaelt

      Wait. Are you really doing that badly?
    

If they've made $124 I'd wager they're doing worse than their business plan
calls for, because that's about 17 hours of work at federal minimum wage.

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eliajf
Understood. They are 1/5 to the way of what most apps make though. :-)

I meant there are multiple variables here and they are focused on conversion
rate. I'm not certain they are doing that badly there. If they had a million
downloads instead of 6000, the story would be different given the same
conversion rates. 6000 downloads is nothing.

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hesdeadjim
This is a common rookie mistake unfortunately. My company has been in the
business for over three years and making level content the basis of a freemium
strategy has never been anything but a failure for us. The prevailing consumer
attitude seems to be be a sense of entitlement, e.g. I downloaded this app or
paid a pittance for it, I should get everything without having to pay more.
The irony is that once they decide they like it, they are more than willing to
blow lots of money on items that allow them to cheat or customize their
experience.

Edit: I would also add that this is not unique to a platform like iOS. Riot,
the company who makes League of Legends, makes _lots_ of money primarily
selling skins for heroes you can play in the game.

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kranner
Good point, we're just beginning to realize this.

In this version, users get only one hint per level because we didn't want to
spoil the game. But this of course hurts the sales of the hint packs as we've
just found out. So we're moving to allow multiple hints starting from the next
version.

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aptwebapps
I could be wrong, but I don't think that goes with what hesdeadjim is saying.
The point seems to be that player's expect core features to be included but
once hooked will gladly pay for more superficial features.

It might be hard to come up with that sort of feature for your game as it
doesn't feature tiny people running around and is rather abstract.

I guess hints are slightly less core than levels, but not by much, IMO.

Any ideas for a slightly different kind of level/game play? You could sell
that as a pack.

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kranner
Other than a time-trial mode (which seems to be a 'Flow Free' innovation, so
I'm disinclined to copy that outright) and sprite-themes ('halloween pack'
instead of letters from the alphabet), I can't think of much at the moment.

I don't know about hints being a core feature though. Flow Free includes as
many as 600 free levels but only 3 free hints. It could be that they are
monetizing poorly on level packs, relative to downloads, and hoping to catch
up with hints.

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shalmanese
After downloading your game, your prompt of "try one more" is an invitation
for me to quit playing and do something else. I think something like "next"
would be better but even better would be to just directly dump people into the
next puzzle.

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kranner
That's a great idea, thanks. I'll try "Next" but going straight into the next
level would be a bit abrupt. Some people are spending over an hour per puzzle
(as I did myself with Nikoli's hand-made levels six months ago), and it seems
appropriate to give them a small celebratory moment.

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peapicker
An hour? Wow. I did all 100 free levels last night, and other than 61 and 62,
which took 10 min each, i solved all in 5 sec to 4 min. I used exactly 1
hint...

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kranner
That's pretty awesome. Thanks for playing it.

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clarky07
Freemium is really hard to get right, but Apple is really pushing everyone
that direction. The changes in the search results over the last few months
have heavily favored free apps.

I just tried a free promotion in one of my apps, and sadly didn't take enough
advantage of it. I just added ads, and didn't worry about adding an IAP to get
rid of them as I was planning on going right back to paid (only showing ads to
free users). Sadly I got quite few bad reviews for the ads being "too
intrusive" (only 2 ads in the whole app, 1 popup and 1 interstitial, i think
they were just too close together in the workflow). I think if I had the IAP
there would have been less excuse to give a bad review. Don't like ads, then
you should give me money.

That being said, I made more money both yesterday and today each than I did in
the last month of it being paid. It's also showing up significantly higher in
the rankings after 11k downloads instead of a couple paid downloads.

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n9com
Seriously, 100 levels, how many people (% of userbase) are going to finish all
100 and still want more? Clearly no thought whatsoever went into this
strategy.

Even 30 is too much, 15 max.

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bpatrianakos
I think you're being too harsh here. It's way too easy to sit here and
armchair quarterback about how "clearly no thought went into this strategy"
but you just don't know that and frankly that just sounds like a cheap shot.

It only takes about 10 seconds to complete a level so when you take that into
account 100 levels seems alright. Also, if we're talking about a mobile game
with hundreds of levels then it's not tough to infer that the levels must go
by quickly with the challenge increasing slowly and it also tells me that it's
likely that this is one of those games that is hoping to retain users by being
highly addictive. Now I know all games want to be addictive but there's a
difference between puzzle solving type games (or so,etching like Kitten Jump
even) and say a car racing game. They're addictive on different levels in
different ways. This is all stuff that can be inferred by reading the post and
much of it proven by playing the game.

So considering this I think it's really unfair to say no thought went into the
strategy. After reading the post I think it's clear they thought quite a bit
about the strategy. A lack of thought isn't the problem here. The problem was
making the wrong assumptions based on their research. This could have happened
to anyone and I don't think you're giving the developers enough credit. I
think anyone who is able to code a game for an app store is certainly smart
enough to think through a half decent monetization strategy.

In the end it's just a live-and-learn experience. They thought they'd get X
in-app purchases because of Y but didn't. Their assumptions were wrong and I
can't fault them. The mobile space is in its infancy (i heard it called a
zygot here the other day even) and yeah, there's some published data to help
app developers make informed decisions about monetization but in the end, when
you step out of the tech bubble/echo chamber, it's really not a lot to go on
and a lot of it is exactly what this article was; a breakdown of personal
experience. The developer took a good shot, failed, and now we have some more
information that'll hopefully help someone else make a decision as to their
monetization strategy. The more information like this that gets out there from
a wide variety of app "types" the better it'll be for others going down the
same path later.

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kranner
Thanks, bpatrianakos.

We're indeed just treating this as a useful experiment. Games are just hard to
compete in. We're not committed yet to staying in games, and hopefully the
design/monetization/marketing lessons will give us a significant edge in
smaller niches where the competition seems much less savvy, at least for now.

~~~
n9com
Sorry, I didn't realise you were looking for sugar coated feedback. If 15
levels isn't enough to hook your customer into paying a few bucks, then you're
doing it wrong.

If you still think giving away 100 levels made any logical sense, then I won't
waste time trying to help you out with clear cut advice based on 3 years of
app store experience.

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jakejake
Games that I really like and have purchased, I would be hard-pressed to
complete 100 levels before growing a bit tired of the game. I can only think
of perhaps two games that I have gone that far.

Perhaps I'm not a loyal gamer or a super-fan of any game. But I do buy games,
probably 1 or 2 per month. With 100 free levels it's most likely that people
like myself would never even get to the stage where purchasing this game was
necessary - even if I loved it. And if there was no reminder, I may not even
really think about it.

It's wonderful to be a nice company and to give away something really fun for
people to play. But, there's no need to be so nice that you can't stay in
business. Especially with games at $0.99 or whatever, it really is not asking
much for people to pay a little to help support the game that they enjoy.

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mahen123
I think it will be nice move to restrict free level's to a max 10 level's,and
then may be few more level's unlocked on the basis of his timing's or point's
collected while playing free level's,for.e.g if his avg timing come's out to
2-3 sec he will get additional of 5-10 level's..

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corysama
A 25% immediate bounce out rate is to be expected for a free, no-expectations,
no-commitments download. Meanwhile, 50% of users making it to level 20 is
really good! Work on levels 20-25 to reduce their steep drop-offs then move
the pay point from level 100 to level 20.

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mdonahoe
Did this come before or after Flow Free?

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kranner
After. Flow came out around the time (end-June?) that I was seriously getting
started on this project.

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jconley
You should test the level cutoff concurrently. Try 5, 30, 100 in a
multivariate test. Spend enough ad dollars to get a comfortable level of
significance within a week. Roll up the test for everyone. Make sure you don't
tell anyone how many free levels they'll get until they hit the wall. Repeat.
:)

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rhizome
When they sign up, just set their limit as rand(20)+5

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rhizome
30? Try 5.

