Idealistic free-to-play developers Flippfly had to face reality when their app, Monkey Drum got great ratings but generated little cash: you need to leave them wanting more.
"Our thinking with Monkey Drum went something like this: 'If a good conversion rate is something like 1-3 percent, maybe we can achieve that by delighting our users into wanting to give us more,'" writes Aaron San Filippo, co-founder of Flippfly.
Turns out, not so much.
"The more we look at effective F2P design and contrasted it with our app, the more we realize that this doesn't work in reality. Your users need to love your app -- but you need to leave them wanting more."
"To date the app has been downloaded over by over 80,000 users, and has a 4.5-star rating. Users love it," writes San Filippo.
On the other hand, he writes, "the conversion rate was pathetic, and the average revenue per paying user was low enough that despite its decent download numbers and great review scores, we had achieved less than $500 in revenue after several months."
San Filippo writes of the company's overarching "determination not to be evil", which led the developers to make everything unlockable with a virtual currency users could earn as well as purchase. This didn't work out well: "it turns out that most of our audience really enjoys the process of playing the instruments and unlocking these."
In short, the developers made the mistake of letting players unlock it all, and didn't ever steer them towards spending money.
To find out all of the problems Flippfly encountered making its first free-to-play app, read the new feature, 7 Ways to Fail at Free-to-Play, on Gamasutra.
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In the 3 or 4 years I've been watching, I've never seen the donations drop below $1,000 a month. Usually they seem to be between $3,000 and $4,000, and occasionally over $10,000. Compared to the less than $500 over several months described in the article, I'd say that's pretty decent.
The ability to build a community and create games that are intensely social like this, are one of the reasons we also moved to PC as our primary platform. It just seems very hard to do this kind of thing on mobile.
I think for us as a two-man shop, we just feel that we'd rather focus our efforts and time on creating incredible experiences within the games themselves rather than figuring out how to make effective, ethical F2P.
Whenever I play a free to play game I'm acutely aware that the game wants to convince me to spend money, so I'm looking for reasons why I would rather stop playing than do that....because I don't trust the game to entertain me otherwise.
I recently bought A Game of Dwarfs on Steam for about £7, which would imply it's not top drawer, to be fair it's not, but at £7 my expectations of entertainment were much lower, yet I enjoyed playing it immensely, it turns out I'll play a game I spent £7 on more than I'll play a free game that wants to encourage me to spend money.
For me, I'd rather buy a cheaper game than a free game, because then I know the game is trying to entertain me rather than convince me to spend money. It's almost like I can let my guard down and just accept what I experience rather than immediately distrust it.