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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

I would like to build an app that's a series of games, that are all related. I want to use the freemium model, with a one-time payment. No ads, no subscriptions; once you pay, you own the entire game.

What's a better model for this? A single app with a one-time IAP; or two apps, where one is free with no ads or IAPs, but there's a link to a separate paid app with no IAPs?

It seems there's no way to distinguish easily when you're looking at the App Store whether IAP means a reasonable one time purchase for the full game, or a series of predatory IAPs. So having any IAP at all seems to turn off a lot of people. But I'm not sure two separate apps is the best approach either.

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The App Store does list the possible IAPs on the page, so if I see "Full game unlock: $3.99" I'm fine with it. Others may look at "offers IAP" and be turned off< I'm afraid I can't speak for them, but the "demo with IAP unlock" seems like the best of both worlds to me.

Thats actually just old school selling a game. For cash, once, no DLCs, no running costs.

Which is actually awesome.

My first games were Quake, and Quake2. I enjoyed shilling out the cash just once. Bought expansions as budget allowed and was always excited to.

More power to you honestly.

Edit: duck ads.

The question was how to implement the freemium/shareware model in apps. It's important to understand that this model can make a lot of sense, for example in the case of weird and experimental games, where it avoids people wasting their money on something they won't like and leaving disgruntled reviews. It also encourages people to try something new. One approach is to have a single IAP and make the pricing obvious.

I honestly don't think freemium/Ads are a good model.

I understand what you mean, and i think the model pursued by old games was less toxic. They simply released shareware ... just 10% of the game for anyone to try.

Freemium/Ads works well for addicting things, and im not sure how the negative effects of what’s done there can be honestly counter acted.

So its not that i don’t think that the model generates less money, its just burning down the house.

I hate the one-time premium IAP option, because I lost it in some app after reinstall, and it's not compatible with Android's family library.

I'll ignore anything that is shown to have any IAP.

At least the way it works on iOS, iOS is supposed to keep track of whether you purchased that purchase or not (that type of purchase at least not the 'buy x items' consumables), and require apps to have a 'Restore Purchases' option you can click to load which items have been bought and restore the state of your app.

At least in theory, maybe there's been a few cases where it hasn't worked. I'm not aware of any, though.

I don't know how that works on Android. That might not be supported.

> I would like to build an app that's a series of games, that are all related. I want to use the freemium model, with a one-time payment. No ads, no subscriptions; once you pay, you own the entire game.

That sounds a lot like old-school shareware. The free version was a full copy of the game that only included the first few minutes/hours of the missions/worlds/characters. Paying got you the whole thing.

Anecdata: I made a game like this (where enough functionality is playable to find out if you like it, and there's a one-time IAP to unlock the full game) and got a ton of complaints about it. All of them were about IAP generally, not the one in the game. I think people just see the IAP flag in the store and assume it'll be potions or gems or whatever.

One way to do it for iOS/macOS would be to try to get it into Apple Arcade. I don't know what that takes, but all of the games in it are IAP-free and ad free. A monthly fee lets you play any of them. I assume they take a cut and distribute the remainder based on number of downloads/length of game play, but am not positive about that.

> I would like to build an app that's a series of games, that are all related

This reminds me of the Cloverfield series. It would be interesting if you didn't know the games are related at the start or if you know they're related but they're not necessarily the same format or storyline. They just happen to exist in the same world.

> I want to use the freemium model, with a one-time payment. No ads, no subscriptions; once you pay, you own the entire game.

Well, in 90s, this was called shareware. The limited version (i.e. first level/episode) was legal to copy/share between users and who paid got full version.

the obvious downside is to the consumer. For apps with IAP, pricing is almost always confusing. You often have to dig through comments. 2, IAPs don't allow the family account to work. I love buying premium games and having them work on all our family's phones.

The Life Is Strange PC series does something similar. They release in episodes and you can choose to buy one ep, or the whole game upfront. I think they're pretty successful with it but I don't think it would be as successful in mobile games.

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