So, having read the previous 13 chapters, you now are imbued with the skill and knowledge required to build a great Android game. Is it as simple as “build it and get rich?” Certainly not! Making money by marketing and monetizing your game is a skill in itself, and there is a lot you need to learn to become successful at it—not just after your game is completed, but even before you start developing it. The real moneymakers are often designed from the planning stage to become popular and to make money, on top of being well made.
Monetizing Your Game
Monetizationis a commonly used term that roughly translates to the process of making money from a product or service. When someone says, “I need to monetize my game,” what they are saying is that they need to take the current user base of the game and find a way to start bringing in real money from it.
There are many ways to monetize your game:
Banner ads: Graphics or text ads that generally operate on a pay-per-click basis. We’ve all seen banner ads on the Web and in apps and games. They are ubiquitous on websites.
Full-screen ads: Much like banner ads except they demand much more attention from the user, often requiring the user to click a button or wait a certain length of time to dismiss them. Video and registration forms are common in this format.
In-app purchases: Options for the user to purchase content, items, upgrades, or virtual currency for real money. An example would be buying a level pack for 99 cents or purchasing a “low gravity” cheat for $1.99.
Virtual currency incentives: Options that provide the user with in-game virtual currency in exchange for performing a task. For example, the user might be presented with an option to install a third-party app in exchange for 50 in-game coins that can be used to purchase an upgrade for a character.
In this scenario, the third-party app publisher pays a fee to a service for that install, and the service, in turn, pays you, the game developer, a portion of that fee. These are usually called “discovery” services, because a publisher is paying to have their app discovered by new users.
Direct sales: The user pays directly for the game and installs it. This was the first monetization method before ads and virtual currency.
Licensing: A broad range of options through which the game developer licenses the game to other companies for bundles, preinstalls, or other mass deployment.
There are, of course, more ways to make money through your games, but these are definitely the most common methods. They are discussed in more depth next.
Advertising
Advertising was one of the first “big” ways that Android games were monetized. Anecdotally, we can tell you that advertising is best regarded as a supplementary rather than a primary monetization method because of its volatility. Mobile ad space has been very unreliable in terms of revenue generation, and there is a significant amount of competition. Basically, there are a lot of mobile apps advertising and not as much money behind those ads, so naturally that money is spread thin throughout the ecosystem. Does this mean putting some ads in your free Android game isn’t a good idea? Surely not. It’s still possible to make a lot of money through ad revenue alone, but be prepared to test a number of different advertising solutions to find the one that fits your market niche the best.
Ad Providers
Ad providers deliver the ads directly from advertisers and pay you for clicks. You are paid only a portion of the amount that the advertiser pays for the click, with the rest going to the ad provider, which is how the ad provider makes money. Ad content can range anywhere from automotive parts to dietary supplements. Often, you will need to configure keywords for your app so the content can be more relevant for your users. Ad providers use a variety of formats, but the most common are banner ads and full-screen ads. The target is moving fast, but here are a few examples of major ad providers:
AdMob, owned by Google ( www.admob.com )
Millennial Media ( www.millennialmedia.com )
Greystripe ( www.greystripe.com )
Ad Aggregation Services
With mobile ads, it isn’t just a matter of implementing banners or full-screen ads. You may also want to consider an ad aggregation service. An aggregation service serves up ads from a number of providers for your game. In this way, you can set up a single ad placement (such as “banner top”) and rely on an aggregator to search different ad providers for the most valuable ad for your ad space, allowing you to get the highest paying advertisement in that spot. Many of these services have popped up in the past few years, but here’s another quick list of current major players:
MoPub ( www.mopub.com )
AdWhirl ( www.adwhirl.com )
Inneractive ( http://inner-active.com )
Mobclix ( www.mobclix.com )
Each of these services has its own API, most of which are generally easy to use. For any particular service, visit their website and view their documentation for more technical information on implementation.
Game Advertising Tips
So, if you’ve decided to advertise within your game, what’s the best way to go about it? Sometimes less is better, so let’s run through the list of what not to do with your advertising:
Interrupt your player just as they are getting engaged
Frustrate your player
Ruin an otherwise good experience with an ad always showing
Trick the user into clicking
It’s easy to overdo it with ads. The point of advertising is to make some money from your game, right? More ads doesn’t mean more money; rather, more ads usually leads to lower ratings for your game, and lower ratings leads to fewer users, which isn’t good in any way. Keep the ad exposure tasteful. Users expect some advertising in exchange for a free game. Placing ads at the top or bottom of a menu during idle time is good.
For full-screen ads, wait! You may want to show that ad right away when the user starts your game, but you’ll just lose credibility. Wait until the third, fourth, or even fifth time the player has launched the game to display a full-screen advertisement.
Focus on building a good game experience, and your players will trust your ads more. If you focus too much on how to maximize your payout, your users will feel it and your game will suffer .
In-App Products
In-app products (IAPs) can be huge moneymakers. The general idea is that the player wants something that is offered in your game and is willing to pay a small amount of money to get it. There are two types of in-app product options given for the Google Play store:
Managed items: Things such as a character, a level, or an ability. Managed items can be purchased only once, and they attach to the buyer, not to the device; that is, if the buyer buys the item on one device, the item will be available on the buyer’s other devices so long as the buyer uses the same Google account on all devices.
Unmanaged items: Things such as virtual currency, coins, expendable upgrades, entry tickets, and anything else that gets “used up” by the player and needs to be “refilled.” Unmanaged items can be purchased over and over again, adding to the existing number or amount. Unmanaged items are also attached to the Google account, not to the device on which they are purchased.
On top of that, you can also set up subscriptions that bill at regular intervals. Subscriptions are seen by your game as just “on” or “off” at any point in time, so you can provide whatever content, service, upgrade, or other feature you want while the player is subscribed.
The Google Play service for processing IAPs is called In-app Billing. The Google Play Developer Console provides you with an interface for your game to set up your purchasable items. The most compatible way to name your purchasable items is to use your app package name as the prefix; for example, com.badlogicgames.awesomegame.300points would work for a 300-point purchase.
So, what’s a good strategy for setting up purchasable items? There is no clear answer because it depends entirely on your game. One very effective strategy centers on using virtual currency for everything.
Virtual Currency
Virtual currency (VC) is in-game money. Whether you call it gold, gems, rubies, coins, credits, or a name you invent, VC is a number that your game stores for the player, allowing the player to buy stuff. Your VC doesn’t need to have a one-to-one relationship with real money, just a clear relationship with the game. VC is nice because acquiring it becomes a primary or secondary goal of the game, and you can utilize that goal to monetize your game. Without getting too deep into the psychology of it, people seem to be motivated to buy VC because they either want a shortcut in gameplay, enjoy personalizing their game experience, or just like buying stuff.
VC, being one of the most popular types of purchasable items that games offer right now, is commonly sold in tiered amounts, with discounts for larger purchases; for example, 100 points for .99 cents, 500 points for $3.99, 5,000 points for $29.99, and so forth.
One good strategy that many game programmers use is to award VC for in-game actions, like breaking a golden brick or winning a level. Some games have timed levels that award more VC for beating the level in less time. Other games have multiple types of VC so that the programmer can control how scarce one type of VC or the other is, forcing the player to choose between item purchases and upgrades more carefully or to play more to get enough of one type of VC so that they can purchase a particular upgrade or item. A common strategy is to make the game free, allowing the user to collect VC and purchase things organically, but to also offer shortcuts and cheats as IAPs, such as giving the player the option of advancing faster—basically, paying you real money in exchange for being able to play through the game quicker or score a little higher. This strategy and variations of it are very effective monetization tools.
There are VC-related services, like TapJoy ( www.tapjoy.com ), that allow you to monetize your game not just with VC, but also by making offers to the user that pay the user with more VC. These services offer incentives like “Install this other game and get 50 coins” or “Click on this ad and get 25 coins.” So far, this type of service seems to be effective. The service pays you, the publisher, a converted amount of real money for these actions, and your players love it because they don’t have to spend any real money to get the VC they so desperately want.
To Sell or Not to Sell
In the early mobile game market, the primary revenue model was to offer both a free, limited-functionality version of the game and a paid, fully functional version, with the goal being to get players hooked on the trial version and wanting more, leading them to buy the paid version.
The landscape since then has changed drastically, with game developers giving away more and more functionality to users for “free” and relying more heavily on monetizing their games using forms such as those discussed in the “Monetizing Your Game” section. It’s important to really study the market and see how well new games do when they go straight to the paid model. You can gather rough information just by viewing details on the top games in the Google Play store. Users are more apprehensive than ever about paying for something that they haven’t already engaged in, and they have so many free options that they may pass a new paid game straight over.
On the flip side, Google Play still has a “paid” category, so in some cases it may make sense to publish a paid game that you believe can rise up in that category. Either way, the choice depends heavily on how desirable your product is. A game that uses a recognizable, licensed character, for example, will likely sell copies no matter what the content is. A brand new game with no previous track record may struggle to sell any copies at all. You will want to take all marketing facets into account when making this decision.
Licensing
Licensing is a great option for quickly monetizing a game. When we say “licensing,” we’re talking about making a deal where another company pays you for the rights to distribute a certain number of copies of your game. For example, a major cellular service provider or smartphone vendor may want to preinstall your game on a new model of phone that will be released soon as an extra incentive to potential buyers. In this deal, the company will either ask you to let them preinstall the game at no cost to them or ask you to quote them some per-unit prices. Per-unit prices these companies are willing to pay are typically several times lower than the retail price of the game. If your game normally sells for $2.99, for example, the bundle price may be 20 to 50 cents per unit. It depends entirely on a number of factors, such as how popular your game is and how many installs there will be. Obviously, you will want to negotiate the best deal you can get, but if you structured your game such that it’s freely distributed and relies on monetization through VC and IAPs, you not only can afford to give it away for free, but can reap big returns through the greatly expanded user base. In such a case, everyone wins.
With any agreement, make sure you read the contract and negotiate terms that are right for you. It takes a little extra time and effort up front but adds up in the long run.
Getting Your Game Discovered
There are many thousands of Android games available already, with many more on the way. Just scroll through the list of most popular games on Google Play and you’re sure to see many new titles that you’ve never heard of, developed by new companies that you didn’t know existed. Some developers get lucky, but most games that are popular haven’t become popular by accident. Their publishers knew how to get the games discovered by users. How do you get your game discovered by new users? Discovery is key to the success of any game, and while you can always throw money at the problem by buying visibility in the form of advertisements, it’s not nearly as cost effective as some other means, discussed next.
Social Network Integration
If you don’t use Facebook and Twitter, then by all means, put this book down right now and come back after you are registered on both. Social networking sites like these are heavy hitters when it comes to getting your game known. The tactics aren’t so obvious at first, though. Should you just create a Facebook page for your game and tell all your friends to like it? That will get you a couple of downloads, but not much more. Does tweeting help? A little. Neither of these approaches is going to get your game the kind of visibility you need in order to really make it a commercial success.
A few of the great things about these two social networking sites from a marketing perspective are that nearly everyone uses them, they are free to use, and they are friendly to more creative solutions. Here are some examples of how you can exploit these websites to market your game: Give 50 free VC credits to users who “like” your game on Facebook. Give 50 free VC credits to users who mention your game in a tweet. Hold a high-score contest once a month using a service like GREE where the prize is a new Android device, and only allow people to register if they’ve liked you on Facebook. In the last example, you’d have to actually purchase a device to give away as a prize, of course, but as far as incentivizing “likes” goes, such a strategy can work really well. It’s easy to create incentives to get people to share your game with each other, and these networks are the perfect platform for that kind of information sharing.
Both Facebook and Twitter provide Android SDKs that you can download and use to integrate the networks with your game. The specifics change all the time, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to document them here. Both are fairly easy to use, so there’s no excuse for not trying them out!
Tip
GREE recently bought OpenFeint and migrated its users to the GREE platform. GREE provides VC, high score, achievement, friend, and other such services. Check out the GREE Developer Center at https://developer.gree.net/en/ for more information.
Discovery Services
There are companies such as AppBrain whose sole purpose is to help you get your game discovered. Other companies, such as TapJoy, Scoreloop, and Flurry, also have discovery services. Most of these services provide ways to put your game “in network” so that it will be promoted by other games. You can pay for installs and control a campaign to get your game into the hands of numerous people. Remember that we said TapJoy has a service where it pays your player VC for installing another app or game and in turn pays you real money? This is the other side of the equation, where you are the one who is paying TapJoy to have your game installed by players in return for VC.
Different companies offer different methods of discovery, but, in short, if you’re looking to get your game discovered and you have a budget to work with, you may want to look into one or more of these services. When you combine such a service with a good social networking strategy, you might just get the snowball rolling and create a buzz about your game.
Blogs and Conventional Web Media
Another strategy for getting your game discovered is to put together pilots for stories, create videos for demos, and send all of this to blogs that review new Android apps and games. The editors of these sites are bombarded with requests to review apps and games, so do as much work for them as possible by giving them all the information they need up front. Be patient, and you may get some reviews. Reviews alone aren’t going to make or break a game, but it’s one part of creating the snowball effect that can lead to a successful title.
Monetizable by Design
We’ve talked a lot about ways to monetize a game, but we want to make something very clear: it’s much easier to design a game to be monetized than it is to take an already completed game and try to retrofit it to a monetization scheme. A game that’s designed to make money may have one or more of the following elements:
Optional modifiers that affect gameplay:
Boosts
Upgrades
Cheats
Optional content that does not affect gameplay:
Skins
Characters
Item variations that are effectively identical
Additional content:
New levels
New cinematics
Unlockable parts of levels
New parts
Virtual currency that has the following properties:
Can be acquired through regular gameplay
Is used to purchase upgrades
Is used to purchase additional content
Can be purchased using real money
Using these elements, you can design a game from the onset to offer very compelling reasons for users to purchase virtual currency and virtual goods in the game. Sometimes you need to change VC-providing services because of a new feature or because a company has gone out of business. This design is pervasive enough to allow swapping of VC-based services and purchasing services without harming the game by changing or removing content or costing you too much development time when switching services. Therefore, a game that exhibits the following properties can be said to be monetizable by design:
Allows the player to purchase virtual products and currency
Provides incentive for the player to purchase virtual products and currency
This scheme isn’t the only way to do it, but it certainly has been a successful one. There are many successful Android games that use this scheme in some form or another, and we recommend considering it or at least taking note of the general ideas and applying them to your game.
Discoverable by Design
What good is a game that no one ever finds? The truth of the matter is that the market is so competitive now, with so many free games, that to have your game become a big success, you need to pay particular attention during the design phase to how people will discover your game. Some games may seem to spring up out of nowhere and just become popular by chance, but usually quite a bit of thought went into the discoverability of those games when they were being designed.
Games that are readily discoverable have elements beyond a “wow” factor and a good game design. They provide incentives for players to tell other people about the game. Much like a game that’s designed to be monetized, a game that’s designed to be discoverable incorporates most or all of the same elements (virtual currency, virtual goods, unlockables, additional content, etc.) as incentives for telling other people about the game.
Here are a few ideas of how to incorporate into your game content incentives for players to share your game with others:
Make a piece of content that can only be unlocked by entering a referral code received from another player.
Give additional content or VC for tweeting about the game or sharing or liking it on Facebook.
Award players with VC for all referrals they make to other players.
Integrate with Facebook or other social media to post achievements and new high scores.
Create another part of the game that is played as a Facebook app but ties in to the mobile game in some way.
There are many more ways to add incentives, but if you think creatively about how to reward people for sharing your game with others, you’ll be on the right track and will have a game that naturally lends itself to becoming more popular.
Summary
Just developing a game and publishing it isn’t enough to get it noticed or make any money from it. If you employ some of the tactics we outlined in this chapter, you will have a much higher chance of success. The tides of technology are always ebbing and flowing, but the general lessons and ideas provided in this chapter should remain constant. Take what you learned here and think about how you can create additional applications and methods for marketing and monetizing your game.