Hi, I'm curious about the experiences of people who have tried monetizing their games using some form of in-game advertising, as opposed to charging a direct fee for the games.
I've just been doing some rubbery figures, trying to work out if in-game advertising would be an effective way to monetize an FPS game I've been working on for years, and plan on re-starting work on soon.
My thinking is:-
FEE BASED
Sold for $20 with a 1% conversion rate per download = 20 cents gross return per download.
AD BASED
Given away for free with about $2 eCPM ($2 per thousand game plays) worth of advertising in the game = 0.2 cents gross return per initial download.
Ads might be in the form of in game billboards and banners, a browser window that opens on exit and which contains text and banner ads, etc. Ads could be highly targetted to a game playing audience interested in the genre of the game, so $2 eCPM is probably fairly conservative.
A free game could potentially eventually get ten times the number of users as a demo for a fee based game.
The average user is also likely to play the game at least ten times.
This means the game is likely to earn around the same amount as the fee based version, in the long term.
---
Some other considerations for a fee based game would be publisher fees, transaction fees, the cost of adding extra polish to a game (which you may or may not need for a free game), extra development time involved in adding that polish and dealing with publishers, etc.
Feel free to discuss your own thoughts and experiences on the subject.
I've just been doing some rubbery figures, trying to work out if in-game advertising would be an effective way to monetize an FPS game I've been working on for years, and plan on re-starting work on soon.
My thinking is:-
FEE BASED
Sold for $20 with a 1% conversion rate per download = 20 cents gross return per download.
AD BASED
Given away for free with about $2 eCPM ($2 per thousand game plays) worth of advertising in the game = 0.2 cents gross return per initial download.
Ads might be in the form of in game billboards and banners, a browser window that opens on exit and which contains text and banner ads, etc. Ads could be highly targetted to a game playing audience interested in the genre of the game, so $2 eCPM is probably fairly conservative.
A free game could potentially eventually get ten times the number of users as a demo for a fee based game.
The average user is also likely to play the game at least ten times.
This means the game is likely to earn around the same amount as the fee based version, in the long term.
---
Some other considerations for a fee based game would be publisher fees, transaction fees, the cost of adding extra polish to a game (which you may or may not need for a free game), extra development time involved in adding that polish and dealing with publishers, etc.
Feel free to discuss your own thoughts and experiences on the subject.