According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals. While most people equate marketing with advertising, marketing encompasses market analysis, value proposition, product differentiation, market strategies, and so on. While we don't need all of this in order to build our game, we need to examine portions of marketing to determine what is the best way to bring it to market and make money from all our hard work. Should we charge 99 cents, should we give it away and depend on advertising, or should we try to license the game to a third party? These are all questions that this chapter will help us answer.
In this chapter we shall discuss:
- How to add iAds to a product
- How to add In-App purchases
- How to publish content to the Unity Asset Store
- How to publish the final version of our product
- How to track success with iTunes Connect
This is our final step to putting out a quality application that generates revenue and produces happy customers – our number one priority.
So let's get on with it...
At the time of writing there are over 200 million iOS devices in the hands of consumers, nearly 15 billion downloads of applications from the App Store, with over 2.5 billion dollars being paid to developers in App Store sales. While this alone would have the average developer salivating, one must also consider that there are over 300,000 applications in the App Store with a growth rate of 11,000–15,000 applications per month. As such, one cannot depend on simply shipping a title and expecting it to make money. You will need an approach for how to target customers, get your app on their device and extract money from them – and that approach is commonly referred to as a business model.
While normally one would discuss this as the first topic when planning to build a revenue generating venture, most people's eyes would glaze over in the first chapter and they'd put the book back on the shelf.
As the Apple App Store ecosystem has developed, four successful business models have emerged as viable ways to capitalize on your creation: pure app sales, advertising, In-App purchases, and marketplace component sales.
This is the traditional approach to publishing applications on the App Store. You produce an application, set a price based on some pricing strategy, and then release it to the App Store and wait for customers to purchase your application.
The advertising model is typically used for applications that are distributed for free, though some applications charge money and still include advertisements. Nevertheless, as the game is started or played, the application makes a request to an ad network to include ad content somewhere in the game. As people watch these ads or interact with them, the ad supplier pays the application creator.
The In-App purchase model is quickly establishing itself as the business model of choice for mobile applications. There are two models generally used with In-App purchases. In the first model one develops a form of currency and players use that currency to purchase items in the game world. In the second model, developers sell additional weapons, tracks, vehicles, and so on, which are then added to an existing game to enhance the player's experience.
While not truly a model for selling a game, selling components on a marketplace is something you can consider if you are building components and prefabs for your game and either decide that they are no longer useful for you, or that you want make some money without publishing an entire game. In addition, if you develop a novel solution to a common development problem, you should sell it on www.gameprefabs.com or within the Unity Asset store itself.
There isn't anything preventing you from choosing just one of these business models or implementing all of them in a single product. The only thing you need to do is balance your desire to make money with the end-user experience. So long as you aren't very intrusive into the user playing your game, the model will not annoy the users, but if they begin to feel as if you're fleecing them, you will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.