Apple’s Favorite Strategy Game Is a Financial Disaster | Game|Life | Wired.com: “What Stewart doesn’t understand, he says, is why the game was only downloaded half a million times. Half a million people playing your game would be great news for any app developer. In the free-to-play world, it’s death. Stewart says he needs 3 million players to break even.”
(Via. wired)
Fascinating story about a freemium game that has been featured by Apple several times and is still a financial flop.
As I said in my 360iDev talk last month, I don’t understand why people think the freemium model is “the only way to make money” on the App Store. To me, it’s the most high-risk option available. If prominent Apple features won’t get you enough users to make some money, you’re going to have to do massive amounts of marketing on your own, anyway. So you’re paying tons of money to get the word out, but then giving the product away to 97% of the audience you paid for. Why not pay for that marketing and charge a price to 100% of your newly acquired users?
The number one thing stopping users from buying your app is not money. It has never been money. It’s awareness. People simply don’t know who you are or what your product is. Giving an app away for free doesn’t change that. You’re still just one of hundreds of thousands of other free apps hoping to get a little attention. The only difference is that with freemium, when those few people do pick you out of that sea of other options, you have a 97% chance of not getting compensated.
If One Man Left had charged even $1 for Outwitters, there’s no doubt in my mind it would have made way more money than it did as a freemium app. Apple’s endorsement alone would have pushed the user level up to a sustainable number. Instead, what they got was 500,000 freeloaders who now expect to be supported indefinitely.
Why so many app developers want to work their asses off to produce great content for freeloaders is beyond my comprehension.
