Spaceschuter McGavin Monetization
Today we’re going to take a look monetization options for Spaceschuter McGavin. As per usual, we’ll get there in a winding way.
TL;DR: Diversify!
~AniAko
Spaceschuter McGavin debuted as an alpha prototype focused primarily on game mechanics. At the time I’d say about 60-70% of the game mechanics were addressed. That was two months ago. Since then, we’ve brainstormed about another 20-40% game mechanics and implemented about 10% of that for playtesting. So soon we’re closing a chapter of our game development and move onto UI, FX, Sound, back-end, and monetization.
Why did we focus on Monetization Next?
To be truthful, monetization wasn’t next on our list. If you’re old enough, think back to arcades that would charge twenty-five cents to a few dollars to play a video game. In that market, slapping a price tag on your product involved some market research and a bit of math. In the mobile game market, you’ve got ads, consumables, subscriptions, etc. The days of a consumer buying a turn at a game at an arcade or purchasing a game at a store to play at home has evolved into a sea of mobile software that tries to win over users with features that rarely have much to do with gameplay.
Not knowing if our planned monetization was enough to cover our costs nagged at me for weeks. So I drew out the average cost per advertisement and essentially found how large of an audience I needed to reach to hit our financial targets. That was a start, but that nagging feeling didn’t go away, and it would continue to haunt me until I figured out what was bothering me about it. So I continued to work on fleshing out our monetization plan to see what it was that wasn’t sitting well with me.
Primary: Ads
First up is simple: advertising. Interstitial ads (full screen ads) offer some of the higher eCPM (effective cost per 1000 impressions/views) available. To have a greater understanding of the common advertising methods used, go here. Note: we have not chosen Unity Ads as our Ad platform, but other platforms offer similar functionality.
We dismissed banner ads immediately as our screen real estate is paramount to the gaming experience; allocating space for an ad would cheapen the immersion we believe our game can offer. This left us with interstitial ads and rewarded ads. Interstitial ads were a natural fit between scene changes in Spaceschuter McGavin. It was an easy decision.
Secondary: In-App Purchases – Item Shop
In-App purchases are another offering that can generate revenue. Typically, you’ll find in-app purchases hosted in some form of “Item Shop” in the game that can interact with your distribution platform (AppStore / Google Play). We’re entertaining the idea of offering an item shop in Spaceschuter McGavin. There you’ll be able to purchase ships and powerups you would otherwise unlock/earn during the game’s progress. This strikes a balance for our pay-to-win and play-to-win players; pay-to-win offers shortcuts, not exclusive content. Ultimately, even if Spaceschuter McGavin were to offer exclusive “paid” content, it wouldn’t offer content that misbalanced any of the established mechanics. This was not a choice made lightly, so just remember: Do what’s best for your game.
Before we move on we’ll cover an easy “In-App” purchase almost every ad-backed free-to-play game can offer: remove ads! Just keep in mind that those users are paying you to stop your ad revenue. If ads are the only manner in which your game generates money, you’re putting a hard limit on how much revenue you can expect. The only advise I can give is this: the price to remove ads should be equivalent to the price of the game were you to sell it outright. Essentially allowing the user to “purchase your game and take it home to play”.
To Tertiary… and Beyond!
The negative thoughts persisted. I knew there was something stinking up my cognition. So I continued to dive deeper, this time into the back-end of our game. Then, I found what was nagging at me.
Back-end systems are important structures in today’s games. Game backups, leaderboards, in-game chat, multi-player, etc. all require some form of “server” your user’s devices will have to communicate with. With that comes user accounts, authentication, databases, etc.; in other words, a lot we have to worry about. There are plenty of services that offer some form of “serverless” back-end, but none that will let you scale your game past about 100 users for free. This means there’s a cost to all those important game structures today’s user’s expect.
As I drew out the costs of the back-end features I knew before I finished that I had found what was nagging at me in the back of my head. Our monetization plans didn’t cover our estimated back-end costs. Whoops. This realization almost derailed the entire game, as I couldn’t in good consciousness release a game we couldn’t support. However, there’s other monetization methods I hadn’t yet touched on: Subscriptions
Subscriptions Monetization
I find balancing a game’s economy to be more artistic and less scientific. At the end of the day the numbers have to add up, but coming up with ideas to make those numbers add up isn’t spelled out in a theory somewhere. At first I didn’t like the idea of a subscription model, but it made the numbers add up, so I left the idea in place wondering what else could be offered to subscribers. It only took a few days for the ideas to start coming to me, and before I knew it, I had over-developed the back-end with too many ideas!
Summary
Monetization is an important part of today’s mobile game anatomy, so much so that it deserves the same amount of attention the rest of your game deserves. Don’t wait too long before you begin to crunch numbers to avoid your costs out-pacing your revenue. Delightful Games’ ride through the wild world of mobile monetization has only begun but it feels every bit of important as the core part of the game. As we here at Delightful Games learn more, we’ll share more.
~AniAko