> And as anybody who's spent 5 mins on app-store "optimization" knows - the better your paid, the better your organic - by a right mile.

Sorry, I guess my English is bad. I do not understand this sentence. Could you explain?

I think a few people missed the mark here (in the sub-comments). The point is, if you're already have paying customers, you will get more. Users looking to download new apps discover them on the Top Paid charts more than anywhere else. The exception is to get featured, but this is a crapshoot. In other words, social proof is the strongest indicator for the long term viability of revenue for iOS apps, and it's hard to be gamed.

So (as others have rightfully pointed out) many app developers solve this issue in their early days by using paid ads...mainly FB ads, as their conversion rate analysis is so ridiculously well engineered. Which means you can theoretically turn off paid search/discovery and rely on on your high position on the Top Paid charts to drive you more even traffic. (Note - Many of them do not turn off paid acquisition channels as they are still highly lucrative anyway)

> the better your paid, the better your organic - by a right mile

I interpreted it as meaning the higher your app is ranked in the 'paid' category (preferrably in the top 20 or higher), the better your organic acquisition rate is going to be (logically because you'll get all the "free" advertising for being featured on the front page of the "Top Paid".

It's a self-reinforcing cycle...more customers, higher ranking, more customers...if you can swing it.

He's saying that the more money you put into paid ads and the more conversions you pay for, the more organic (non-paid: referral, from press, or search, etc.) conversions you'll get.

Yeah, that was tricky. I think he means "the better your paid [search results], the better your organic [search results]." Meaning you can buy improved organic search results.

It means the better your paid install rate (via advertising), then you'll have greater organic installs as a result (usually due to your app spamming enough unwise people on twitter and facebook).

This is a natural result of paid advertising driving installs which the app store uses to rank games in their categories or create recommendations for their landing pages.

Source: I worked at a f2p mobile company.

paid advertising turns into far better organic growth by a very large margin.

> It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else.

It's not only iOS, it's exactly the same thing on Android. Some companies also tried it on Vita and PS3 with games like Rainbow Moon and Destiny of Spirits, but ultimately failed. Interestingly i've also been able to get people to completely drop free-to-pay games by getting them other hardware like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS.

So basically the only platforms where this happens are the two primary cellphone platforms.

Are we pretending PC isnt a platform?

As far as i know free-to-pay stuff never worked even remotely as well as on cellphones, because on average pc gamers are more experienced and recognize more easily when a skill-based difficulty curve morphs into a payment-based difficulty curve. So i didn't think it worth mentioning.

League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, Dota 2, Hearthstone, World of Tanks (etc) are all wildly successful F2P PC titles.

How is minecraft free2play or free2pay?

Also, afaik LOL, TF2 and Dota2 sell content as micro transactions, not consumable cheats. I don't know if the same is true for Hearthstone, and i know this is true for WoT, but its lunch is being eaten by War Thunder, which also only sells content.

Hearthstone doesn't sell anything that you can't get by playing the game longer. It's a card game, they sell card packs. You can earn them without spending but it takes a while, and your ability to do that is dependent on how good you are.

I wouldn't say it's pay-to-win, but players aren't on equal footing from day 1 like in Dota2.

I'd love to hear the substantial difference between Clash of Clans selling you gems that make your building finish faster and LOL selling you XP boosts?

Gladly.

First off, i need to clarify how the two work, since they work substantially different to one another:

LOL boosts come in two variants, but the net effect is the same: XP income per time unit played is doubled. You can spend more money to have them apply to more time units played, but you can't increase the effects of the boosts. They do nothing else. (I assume rising in level also pushes one into higher level matches against stronger players.)

Meanwhile CoC gems do a multitude of things: They permit access to items that are otherwise inaccessible and increase competitiveness. They are very powerful multiplicators in allowing constructions times (that i assume to span days in the extreme) to be entirely removed. Lastly, they allow the player to ... play more by restoring heroes.

So, the practical effects are:

LOL XP boosts do not increase competetiveness of the player. In fact, they can detrimentally affect it by pushing a player into high level matches before they themselves earned the necessary experience to function well in them. Further, players are discouraged actively from spending too much on them, since they may be stockpiled, but not increased in power and past a certain amount of stockpiling it's senseless to buy more.

CoC gems increase competitiveness fo players massively, in some cases (build times) applying literally infinitely large multipliers compared to the x2 multiplied of LoL xp. Further they also serve lock the player out of playing the game unless the player spends real money to buy and spend them on healing their hero.

TL;DR:

LoL xp boosts are fixed subscription fees with a maximum cap.

CoC gems are literally consumable cheat codes designed to encourage unlimited spending.

Lol have level cap. So after a while xp boosts are pointless. What they really sell is cosmetics and rune pages

That sure is a lot of words trying to disguise the fundamental truth that there is basically no difference between the effects of LoL boosts and gems. Both advance your summoner/base in exchange for money. They are both time "cheats"that you pay for to avoid a grind in each game.

You say flatly that 'LOL boosts do not increase competitiveness' but this is frankly completely false. An identical clone of myself playing on an account after $300 worth of xp and IP boosts will simply be much stronger than I am with f2p account. Eventually I may catch up but 'eventually' happens in clash of clans too.

LoL is capped at lvl 30. With boost, it will take you 1 week instead of 2 to reach lvl30. It does have any in game effect. Furthermore, they are not an item that you are trained to use as a currency.

The South Park episode about freemium game is very good at explaining how the freemium market model is based on addiction.

> It does have any in game effect.

Right, xp/ip boosts are just hats. New characters you buy are just hats. No in game effect, LoL.

XP boost have no level after lvl 30, which is reached quickly, and is where the real game begins.

IP boost allows you to buy runes quickly, this happens outside the game. Runes have in-game effects, but the difference between T2 (which are extremely easy to buy without spending a dime) and T3 are minor.

I played LoL for years without spending a single penny in it, and I never were under the impression that the game was purposely made boring to force me to buy in-game items.

Freemiums game feels that way. At first, everyting is fun, and they even give you some 'free' currency to hook you on spending, and after a few hour, if you don't pay, the game becomes boring as fuck, because everything take hours.

Basically XP Boost is there for returning players. Experienced players who want to create alternate account or those who move to another server.

It is there for convenience sake but Riot certainly goes out of its way to make creating a viable alternate account rather inconvenient. Being F2P I guess they have to have diverse revenue sources.

All this talk about "cheat" or "increasing competitiveness" is just nonsense.

I may be wrong in stating that XP boosts do not affect competitiveness, but the main point still stands: You only get to advance twice as fast with your 300$ in LoL compared to CoC where you can just blow all of your 300$ in a single day, hour even. There are several orders of magnitude between the two "eventuals" here. Additionally, not having XP boosts in LoL does not block you from playing, which CoC does. And lastly, not buying boosts does not lock any content away from you.

Then again, you haven't discussed in good faith from the get go (which is funny, since I primarily game on pc), so I expect you don't actually want to grok these differences.

I have fun with low XP (the game I'm playing is still there to play). I don't have fun watching buildings build themselves.

The difference here is f2p vs p2w. p2w mean Pay to Win. There are many P2W FPS type games where you can buy weapons that give you an edge over those without those weapons.

In some cases, you can 'unlock' these weapons by earning in game credits, but often the amount of grinding required to get there equates to months of game time.

In DOTA2, LOL, and TF2 the micro-transactions are generally restricted to cosmetic / vanity items. These items offer zero competitive advantage.

did you noted that you said, free-to-pay, on both comments? nice typo, got me a smile.

That's intentional. :)

There are 2 classes of f2p games:

free2play, which sell game content in small units. Characters to use, classes and equipment to unlock, etc. and they also make it possible to gain all of those things in a reasonable manner by simply playing.

free2pay games intentionally abuse the human psyche and subtly push people towards buying things that are at the core consumable cheat codes, and which are not available reasonably through normal gameplay. (They also tune the difficulty curve so this becomes only visible after the player has invested a lot of time into the game.)

I don't like the distinction between things you can get by playing and things you can't. In many games that correlation goes the other way. Unlocking a character provides no benefit, while skipping grind provides benefit.

Especially when it comes to levels; there's nothing at all manipulative about selling level packs.

The more important distinction is between "unlocks more game" and "consumable boost". Keep the message focused.

wow, I never heard of such thing --really interesting.

Also searching the web, I got no relevant result; is this some term you came up with, or are there more info somewhere?

It's a slang word and other people i see online like to use. It's never gone mainstream since understanding the meaning behind it requires actually putting in some time to study psychological effects.

It’s more usually referred to as pay2win

Spiderweb can't compete with the likes of Supercell because their games are niche.

It's an old-school 2D party-based rpg, it looks dated and they recycle the engine year after year to release more games, as their loyal fanbase is more interested in the new storylines and quests than they are in gameplay updates.

I love spiderweb games, but you could spend millions marketing them and they would still be niche, I don't think the discovery issue is the only challenge here; casual management games are the Call of Duty of mobile gaming.

Recycling? More than you might think! The iOS version of Avernum 2 was a port of the desktop version released a few months earlier, which was a remake of the original version of Avernum 2 from around 2001, which was itself a remake of the 1996 "Exile II". The graphics and game engine changed a bit, but the storyline was essentially identical.

Not only are they niche, they are also pretty distinctively not skinner boxes with a nice display. Games at the top often are.

IAPs have destroyed the gaming market on iOS. Funnily enough there's a lot of money being thrown around and a few companies have become rich, but if you're looking for quality it's really really difficult to find something worthwile.

I was hoping that iOS could become a premium platform for games, with titles like Broken sword, The orient express and others. There are a few gems here and there, but most of it is IAP-infested, pay to win. Even if I could in theory play those few good games, I've decided to give up on the iPad, as ultimately those companies won't be able to support themselves and I expect fewer and fewer quality games.

I genuinely hate how apple has pushed microtransactions as the only viable route for app/game demos on their platform. I want to try out an app or game for free, and then decide if I want to purchase the full thing or not. This is how games always worked, and this is how Steam / PS3 / Xbox work.

The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a result, the best games either get lost in the sea of free stuff, or completely forgo a demo and just list in the paid section. Quality content doesn't stand a chance.

Apple hasn't pushed this. If anything they are pushing quality paid titles and trying to given them lots of visibility. The market however has spoken.

> Apple hasn't pushed this.

Of course they have, otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. There are lots of quality apps that would be rescued from the freemium category if Apple provided this as a distribution feature.

>otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos.

Like LITE version and Pro version of an app? Yeah, Why don't aht exist? Oh wait, it does. The devs just choose to make a free app and then have the pro version as in app purchase.

But I guess the devs doing it that way is also Apples fault. Somehow everything is Apples fault according to you people.

No, the goal is to have only _one_ version of an app, with a time limit or limit to the # of times it can launch, etc., which Apple doesn't have any provision for. IAP for content is the next best thing, otherwise you have to maintain two separate apps, which is objectively terrible.

You can have the demo experience you're describing by unlocking the substantial content as a single IAP.

It's not Hollywoods fault we got Transformers 3, it's the 50 million people who bought tickets to Transformers 2.

And now to complete the conversational loop and point out the problems of categorizing demos via IAP, I point you right back to my original comment.

You do realize that a full unlock via IAP is basically the shareware approach?

Just because something has IAP doesn't make it bad. One has to look at how the app uses IAP instead.

How can you possibly reconcile the idea that demos would somehow beat out micro transactions if only they had their own category despite the fact that they fail living side by side with microtransactions?

beat out?

Discoverability is what the person is talking about, and it would indeed improve discoverability.

And the reason we got Transformers 3 is because the 50 million people will buy whats being made available for them and pushed.

Keep in mind that via Spotify's subscription model it's only something like 20% of the what users listen to thats chart music. The rest is outside the normal popular genres.

So it's a chicken and an egg discussion.

No the 50 million people chose to consume Transformers 2 instead of John Carter, they don't just buy anything the studios shove in their face.

They buy what they are presented with and whats considered popular. How can they know up front whats good and bad?

Thats how the movie industry still works that how the music industry used to work.

I bet you Netflix show the same tendency of having more people see non-chart movies than if they had to pay for it.

As to why you're downvoted: HN has become rather eager to downvote. I'd even say toxic, because a few months ago I were downvoted and I knew I deserved it. Nowadays it's because I or someone else has an unpopular (but well reasoned) opinion. It's frustrating, not because I care for my Karma but because I'd like to have a discourse beyond agreeing on the popular opinion.

Yeah. I thought down votes was for things that was factually wrong, trolling or ruining a discussion not for disagreement.

Which is why I really wished down votes came with a requirement to quality why you are being down voted.

He's probably been downvoted because his entire chain of comments boils down to "Hurr durr, people R sheep!"

Funny.

Here I though I was making an argument that when people where given the freedom to choose without it having financial implications they would in fact choose differently than when they have to pay for it and a "mistake" means more.

People think a lot of things. Doesn't mean they're right.

No you would normally look at the evidence or an argument. I have provided some, now it's your turn.

Nice to be downvoted without any argument as to why.

Apple is 100% guilty of this. Of course consumers will prefer free or very cheap software, but what most of them don't realise is that software is STILL very expensive to produce and maintain, so there will be a perverse incentive to extract value in other ways.

The solution is very simple: ban buying gems, virtual dollars and all that crap.

Apple have total control of the appstore, so it is their fault. If you could sideload games - then it would have been different because niche games could use other means of getting on devices (like humble bundle for android)

Apple didn't do this. Companies wanting to make money since so few people actually paid for games up front did this.

Meta critic reviews don't hold much weight for me here, there's a knee jerk mentality in much of the professional press against all freemium games that's justified in many cases but certainly not across the board.

I don't play Clash of Clans or Game of War but I do play Boom Beach from Supercell and I can tell you with zero spent in over a year its far and away better than any other mobile game I've seen and I've bought almost every 4.5 star or better Toucharcade game for iOS.

Supercell is in Finland, an EU country. From my understanding Supercell actually pays much higher than prevailing wages.

Software developers are generally paid quite a bit less in Finland than in the valley (e.g. 5k euros is quite high for a dev there) with a comparable cost of living. It's expensive in Helsinki and you won't find better paid developers anywhere in the world outside of the states.

Not to say the above is correct - it's no sweat shop and the few outliers like supercell and rovio cannot possibly be there because they threw a lot of labor at it. They're quality game companies that hit the market at the right time and knew their audience enough to keep them.

Just to add about the employment costs in Finland: 5000 € gross salary means about 6000 € total cost with payroll-related taxes and mandatory payments included, and about 3250 € net pay per month after taxes.

It's certainly no sweat shop, but I would consider it modest cost if you account for the quality of the developers.

You're absolutely right.

Actually, Scandinavia in general has high quality developers on the cheap compared to the states. This while their quality of life seems on a whole better - seems a win/win to invest in or open satellite offices there :)

And, for good or bad, it is also much easier to both expand/hire and close/downsize in Scandinavia than in other parts of Europe. At least in Denmark and Finland, maybe less so in Sweden. (Norway is really expensive to hire anyone, though).

This flexibility to lay off people is not always a win/win for employees (considering Nokia/ALU merger right now) but I think that investors generally overestimate the bureaucratic difficulties in Scandinavian countries in this respect. Scandinavian countries are very free market economies despite being "socialist".

> Software developers are generally paid quite a bit less in Finland than in the valley

Pretty sure Silicon Valley is an outlier when it comes to wages for software developers...

Supercell is based in Finland, which is an EU member state.

Isn't Supercell Finnish? That counts as EU.

"Clash of Clans is Supercell which is a foreign company that can afford to pay their developers less money in a foreign market. Any US or EU company would have a hard time competing with them."

This really isn't true, as the costs of personnel are usually dwarfed by the costs of marketing.

Aka the cost of getting Kate Upton to run around with her boobs out asking if you want to be her hero.

Hey now, give Kate Upton credit where it's due; she also struts around battlefields and tells people to shoot monsters with catapults. That's hard fucking work.