From Free to Paid App
Hey, as I'm trying to grow Danger World, I've been thinking about this more and more.
The intention was always to charge a small flat amount for the game. Maybe $3 for the game, with an eventual $2 for multiplayer or something like that.
However, those numbers reflect where I want to end up. Right now, Danger World is free and growing. Not being free means you grow slower. How have others made this "free app first -> paid app later" transition"?
I've tried to be open about this: https://danger.world/blog/monetization
That being said, I know this is all about managing user expectations. I worry that the longer I wait to make the cutover, the worse it'll be. I also wonder how slowly increasing the price to the final price point over the span of a few months would work.
I've also been a bit disappointed by the "coupon code" offerings from Apple and Google. I'm advertising on a podcast in a month or two and would like to offer those listeners a discount if the app is paid at that point. Traditionally this might be announced like "use our code MYCAST2019 for $1 off" (or free or whatever), but it seems like the only available options are a pile of autogenerated codes. I know I could hand roll some amount of this with IAP, but....
How have y'all handled advertising for stuff like this? I could just plan a price change (back to free for a 4 day window or something) and the podcast is the only avenue that is told that?
In terms of using those coupon codes for other stuff, burning my whole quarter's coupon code limit on "the game is now $3, but each player gets to invite 5 of your friends for free" sounds like a fun way to get people sharing initially.
#ask-ih #growth
These are hard decisions. My product (though very different from your game) was free during beta as well. I initially was planning to make it a flat fee plus a 30 day trial, but eventually went with the freemium model, because it has immense power to attract potential buyers. It took me a lot of thinking/doubting, but eventually choose the freemium model because I finally found a feature that I was happy limiting in the free version.
So, would the freemium model be worth considering for you? Since it's a game, an obvious parameter would be game content ("levels" maybe). If a player plays for a bit and likes the game enough, these few euro's would be easy to put on the table?
As for the transition. I've given all user's that subscribed during beta a lifelong premium account (using a flag in my own database).
Save slots, levels, and certain features (PvE, PvP, etc) are all things that I've considered. I fully intend to keep my existing users along for the ride.
I consider the "usual freemium" model of letting any rando on the ad network bid to be advertised in my app to be a non-starter. The ad revenue is terrible at my scale, and the ads are actively trying to get my users to stop playing and do something else! The cost/benefit just makes absolutely zero sense.
That being said, I could do old school ads. For example, letting a fantasy author advertise that his/her new book is out and can be bought on the app bookstores. That's the sort of text ad that would be non-invasive and very on-target for the right demographic. For course, an audience still helps for that, haha.
Ha, yeah I hate ads too, they really hurt the user experience. Though there are some platforms that serve "ethical ads", e.g. without tracking the user. I can imagine that such ads, targeted at fantasy could work in your game (you might even make them part of the game somehow) once you've enough players :)
I also did not feel comfortable with a skewed distribution of free and paying users. I wanted to keep the prices low, and that's harder to do if only 1% of users pay. For my case, limiting the number of projects that a user can make basically made the free version a trial, but the transition from free to paid comes at a moment when the user is already engaged.
I have no experience with mobile apps though, I can imagine that expectations are different.
In the long term, I might need to do what you described with the free download basically being the trial with unlockable parts. At the moment, I have a hard time justifying writing "upselling" features when I know what I'm not selling up into anything. Which might just be the problem, haha.