I make my living off of mobile freemium games. We don't do anything with replay timers or the like - we advertise, mostly, and have fun in-app purchases.

For a couple years we offered two versions of our apps - paid and free, free being ad supported. In a bid to simplify things and encourage more conversions, we switched to in-app purchase to get rid of ads. (Also, app stores had been optimized to push down app results for non-free games - plenty of reading out there about the causes and effects.)

To date, just under 5% of our revenue is paid. Despite playing for years, many people don't believe our games are worth $1.99. If you believe the race to the bottom will reverse itself, I'm here to tell you it won't. It's guided by the walled gardens and they like it this way.

We have had millions of downloads and on our most popular game, have abnormally long retention. Even some of our most die-hard players will not spend $1.99.

Maybe - MAYBE console gaming will one day return from F2P, but I doubt it. At least not in the near future - the industry is still moving towards it.

But in mobile gaming, success is a volume play. And the volumes won't part with $.99 in the traditional way. If they did, F2P wouldn't be a thing. And maybe gamers will pay for games, but the masses? Not so much.

I'm not what I would ever describe as a gamer. Well, I was massively when I was much younger in the arcade, 8 and 16 bit days but now, not so much/at all.

The problem I have with many freemium games is for me they have absolutely no lasting appeal. I would estimate that 75% of freemium games I've installed, I may have played a sum total of half an hour and then got annoyed/fed up/bored and removed it. Adverts, replay timers etc. are certainly to blame but what mostly is a turn off for games of these types is there is no soul in a lot of these games.

Take Triple Jump, Don't Step On The White Tile, Avoid The Blocks etc. for example(s). They're like Christmas cracker toys. You play them once or twice, discover how lame they are and throw them away.

While I realise those games aren't meant to be much more than that (and an SEO exercise), there are so many like these on the various app stores and few games that have any kind of depth to them. I would more than happily, and have happily, paid $1, $2 or more for a game that held my interest for longer than half an hour. The biggest problem I have is these throw-away games have been so cleverly marketed or SE-optimised that they make up the bulk of "featured", "highlighted" or "best selling" games and any game with a modicum of depth disappear into the ether, undiscovered. It's frustrating for someone who wants to play a fun, entertaining game, not an annoying, repetitive and uninspiring christmas cracker game.

This is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve with Curated[1]. The Play Store is filled with low-think, one-tap junk these days... Finding a good game on the Play Store is almost as hard as finding a science show on the Discovery Channel. It's optimised for the unthinking masses, which makes sense for Google from a monetary perspective, but for anyone interested in a deep game, then either Google's algorithm needs to get waaaay smarter or we have to do it ourselves.

[1]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.curated.an...

really good, I like how you've done this: clear layout, shows the sort of stuff I'm interested in. Good job.

Try card hunter

>Maybe - MAYBE console gaming will one day return from F2P, but I doubt it. At least not in the near future - the industry is still moving towards it.

That's an optimistic statement almost bordering on naive. What the market seems to be moving towards is adding F2P mechanics to $60 games. GTA V lets you buy in-game money for the multiplayer mode. Mortal Combat X has easy fatality mode where you get the famous "fatality" animations after every game (costing $0.20 every time it triggers). Almost every AAA game on the market lets you change the look of your character for a few dollars.

There is an interesting line in one of those presentations: (paraphrase) "There is a hyper-competitive market for player attention, which has caused the price of a game to fall all the way to zero, but after they're in your [end]game you are a monopolistic provider of the game content, so you can charge any profit-maximizing price."

This is a slightly more nuanced take than mine, which is that F2P games are what gamers have been voting for for years with their wallets, by stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and most of the stuff that was.

I'd prefer the first explanation as well, not least because "optimize your business model for the people who are willing to pay you, not the people who aren't."

I think Kongregate's perspective on F2P is a lot more nuanced than your usual F2P mills (Zynga, et al) on the subject, and I say this as someone who could hardly be described as a fan of F2P.

It's worth nothing that Anthony Pecorella, the speaker in the first linked video, also moonlights for an indie game company (Level Up Labs) that's been quite successful while tacking completely opposite to F2P. So in my experience he has a strong appreciation for both sides of the business. And Emily Greer is a super knowledgeable badass that one ignores at their peril -- a lot of her talks have really challenged some of my assumptions about the F2P business models.

Source/Full Disclosure: I know this stuff because I'm Anthony's co-founder at LUL.

> Eventually, the pendulum will swing the other way. People will get sick of freemium games, and go back to games where you pay $1-$10 once.

> Some people made a lot of money with freemium, so everyone is copying them.

Freemium was a response to the market. Most of players are not willing to pay anything:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/monument-valley-developer-...

It's possible to make freemium without wait timers. See Hearthstone, League of Legends.

I don't see freemium disappearing anytime soon.

Those both essentially do run on wait timers. You can earn the components needed to play at a high level gradually with a limited number of plays per day, or pay to accelerate that process.

This model isn't as harsh as actually locking out from the game if you don't pay, but it sure does move along the same axis of paying to alleviate a time-based restriction.

Uh? This might be somehow true for Hearthstone, but you'll have a hard time convincing me there is any kind of timer in LoL. All the in-game purchases are basically just cosmetics, and the lightweight grinding is more of a tutorial phase than anything else.

Hero purchases are not cosmetic, neither is the grind to level 30 so you can use full rune pages (basicly minor buffs to a collection of stats). It is inaccurate to portray these things as cosmetic.

And yes, I'm sure you can 'have fun anyways' and a host of other standard pay to win excuses, but the fact remains its an element you pay for that makes you more competitive, and not simply cosmetic.

You're exactly right. However, back when the NES came out, duplication of an NES rom was beyond the average consumer. Now, say you release a DRM free game (that will be available regardless of internet connection, server uptime etc) -- how do you monetize it when fans will install free copies?

There's a reason gog.com is making money. Going DRM-free doesn't harm your business, it just respects the users.

If people like a game, they will pay for it as long as you don't have some kind of annoying obstacle preventing them from doing so.

edit: DRM isn't even really a good counter to piracy for the most part. It will be cracked sooner or later (sometimes before the game is even officially released) and the people who wish to pirate it will do so.

DRM is largely about protecting the new-release window where a supermajority of AAA game/video sales happen. It doesn't have to be effective for all time -- if it delays the first crack until release plus two weeks then it's still worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in marginal sales.

It's less effective at even that much than it could be, e.g. any game released on Steam can be cracked in a largely homogeneous fashion.

(Which is exactly the value point I'd be working to improve if I was working at Steam and trying to convince more titles to release there.)

Steam has cultivated a culture of paying for games, because it's easier than pirating, which is easier than buying physical copies. Given their success, I don't think they need to change anything, especially if it makes anything harder for the end-user; plus its bedrock is smaller, more indie titles who can't afford to implement DRM anyway — so the platform treats them very well.

* http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1j4lj3/how_doesdid_st...

Steam is hugely important in this regard because it shows how catastrophically wrong the old guard in games, video, music, and other media are. By default, people accept that paying for things is right. The challenge is to make paying for things easier than not, and to not actively sabotage the social relationship that makes customers prefer paying for things to pirating them. Steam has actually done a reasonable job at that: by contrast, DRM and MPAA/RIAA-style tactics are, to understate, recent-severe-head-wound-level dumb business decisions; they say to customers "our relationship with you is fundamentally antagonistic." Once that social message has been sent and supremely customer-hostile services like Ultraviolet (and worse earlier systems) established, piracy becomes massively attractive and the MPAA/RIAA-style cartels have cut off the ability to have a reasonable conversation about it.

I agree with this - low friction is what makes Steam successful. (Personally I stick with HumbleBundle as the Steam client has traditionally sucked ram).

Steam lets players join multiplayer games with their friends -- seamlessly merging a friend list with game servers across all games. That's a strong incentive to use Steam.

So what about other forms of content without online multiplayer like say, TV shows?

Those people were never going to buy anyway. There (hopefully) are enough people who want good games and are sick of the freemium garbage, that they'll pay for a game.

I.e., 100k paid sales and 10M "unauthorized copies" is still enough for an indie dev to make a living.