Freemium Regret on the App Store

Re:Freemium Regret on the App Store by hesdeadjim on Saturday October 20, 2012 @03:15PM (#4677958)

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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Re:Freemium Regret on the App Store by kranner on Saturday October 20, 2012 @03:20PM (#4677980)

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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Re:Freemium Regret on the App Store by aptwebapps on Sunday October 21, 2012 @12:21AM (#4678959)

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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Re:Freemium Regret on the App Store by kranner on Sunday October 21, 2012 @12:51AM (#4679011)

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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