Design How Do You Usually Monetize Your Application?

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sarahlewisxo

Guest
Hi to Everyone here in the GameMaker Community!

I'm Sarah and I'm all new to the Mobile Game development world.
Right now, I am looking for different ways to monetize an application/ a mobile application (well aside from having it as a paid application) - I don't think that having a mobile application as paid guarantees more users to download so making it free and having add ons could be an acceptable way of monetizing it.

Few things I know are:

1. I can put ads. (Which I think is the most common thing I experience with mobile apps)

2. Add some offer walls. (I have come across Offer Daddy & many others that have Android SDKs to natively integrate to your app)

Which do you believe is more effective?
And do you have comments & suggestions with the above things?
Also, do you think any of the two are somewhat outdated / unstable, etc.?

Please let me know.

It will be much appreciated.

Thank you.
 

Genetix

Member
I've found a pretty good balance in serving ads on a free app and also offering a paid ad-free deluxe version of that app as well. Now that I am moving into GMS2 I'm hoping to get IAP working so I can offer the free app, attain a lot of users, and offer a premium experience to those willing to spend a bit of money from the free app.

Works alright, ads make around $15-$20 a day for me, but paid apps can make that much or more just as well so far.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Note that I'm a normal software engineer by day and only do indie development for fun at the moment, so this advice will be theoretical and is not guaranteed to work.

First of all, make sure that your ads are well integrated into the game... there's a ton of crap games out there that try to CONSTANTLY blast you with ads because they know you're only gonna play the game once anyway and they want to milk you as much as possible during that period of time (illustratory video compilation here), and coming off that way isn't really the best way of leaving a good impression (even though it might be profitable, if you're into short-term benefits and shameless enough... but I'll assume you're not :p).

Here's my general advice:
  • To reiterate my first point: don't make your ads obnoxious and annoying. It leaves a bad impression that will lose you players (and thus monetization opportunities). You need to make ads annoying enough that players want to get rid of them, but still not so annoying they give up on the game altogether.
  • Adapt your ad strategy to what the ads incentivize, and adapt your game to that. If you get the most money from showing long videos, design your game so that the players need to take small breaks between levels (maybe they're very mentally intense puzzles or such). If they're still images that pays per-view, have very short levels and cram them into loading screens or such. If they're banners that pay by the time the player is exposed to them, make a slow-paced strategy game with a dedicated constant-ad-here spot on the screen, and so on.
  • Mobile players have very short attention span (or rather, have their games for a quick distraction while they're doing something else), so make sure your game doesn't force them to memorize tons of complicated rules and special cases. In other words, make sure that you have at most 7 game mechanics, and try to anchor them in stuff that most people take for granted ("fire melts ice", for instance).
  • It's hard to get noticed since the market is so saturated, so try to make reusable components you can quickly fashion into "a completely different game" by replacing graphics and music. To make it less obvious, and avoid competing with yourself, space them out a bit instead of releasing all of them the same week.
  • There's tons of stock resources that can be used for free if you just credit their creators accordingly, use this to simultaneously increase your style repertoire, increase the production speed, and hopefully drive some traffic to other creators.
  • Kids will play anything, parents will look for random cutey stuff for their <7yo kids to keep them occupied. If possible, make your game look like it's meant for kids (at least as an alt version) so you can benefit from this effect.
  • If possible, add a "more games by us" link somewhere that takes the user to your app store profile, so people that like your stuff can find more of it.
 
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Thelap

Guest
I'd suggest implementing ads in between levels or after the user, loses 3 times etc. If you can implement rewarded video in there, where a user can acquire in-game currency or token, then this is not only great for user experience but also great for ad revenue.

Offerwall wall is a tricky one, the rates are amazing but I'm uncertain they suit every game app.
 

Mert

Member
I'm recently looking for an article/youtube video for best using ads on my game. I mean, what's the best way to serve ads ?
 
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Digital256

Guest
I too have the same question as Sarah, great discussion.
 
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Eriksaw

Guest
I'm planning to monetize my app with GlobalHop. As far as I know, this is ads free software and would like to try that.
 
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