Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken
blog.betable.com
blog.betable.com
I actually do like the strategy of making the ads part of an achievement system for the game. This would work especially well for localized ads. For example, if you reach a certain level on a game, get $2 off your sandwich at Subway. This allows for brand exposure and funnels people into the physical stores.
Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by.
Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.
My game as an example: Almost half of the users are under 18, but most of the other half are in the 18-35 range (according to Flurry metrics, which guesses what the age of a user is based on what OTHER apps on the device are reporting -- I'm not asking them myself).
Unless I ask each user how old they are, I can't know whether or not to serve them ads. And if I DO ask them, then people often feel like I'm prying too much. ESPECIALLY if I'm asking if they are under 15 (and finding out they're under 13 would cause COPPA to kick in [1]).
I already have the "no adult ads" selected in my ad provider, which is supposed to block singles ads, but I've seen them come up anyway. Presumably if I fed them an age that I'd gotten from a user they would be filtering the ads more, if only to target them better.
Don't know.
If you block ads, you have NO chance of seeing them, and therefore I have no chance of making the $0.03 that's typical from a single click. And worse, if you block those annoying ads, then you have no motivation to BUY the version without ads!
If everyone blocked ads, you would have no more free games to steal. If you don't want ads, buy games without ads. Don't try to hide behind bogus rationalizations. Blocking ads is clearly unethical, even if you don't want to call it stealing, because the developer intends to make money on his product and is giving it to you with the express understanding that it's ad supported.
My "unlocked" version of the game was pirated on July 15. Almost 2000 new users ran it that day, and all but about 10 of them were pirated copies.
So did I see my sales jump? I sold about 10 units that day, and 5 the next day. I don't think I've seen the numbers top 20 sales per day. If there are moral pirates out there, they didn't show up in sufficient numbers to make up for the devastation that followed.
How about downloads of the free version? Over the next two days, it crashed from consistently getting 750-900 downloads a day to about 350 downloads a day. And because of that drop, it fell off the charts and continued to crash down to 100-200 downloads a day.
So as nice as the theory is -- and as much as it might work for music, where the numbers are MUCH larger and there is some data supporting the theory -- it simply doesn't work for games.
In fact, it pretty much killed my game, because of the way the market rankings work -- the crash in downloads meant it lost position, which meant even fewer downloads, and a death spiral ensued.
So don't give me "piracy is actually good for your game!" when it killed mine. And it's still rated 4.5 stars, with tons of "Awesome game!" reviews, so don't tell me people don't like it.
As for piracy killing your game... bull shit. Every game eventually gets pirated. All the games above you on the charts have been pirated. Why didn't piracy kill them?
Some of the top games probably were noticed randomly by the right bloggers; a Russian blogger loved my game, and it's sitting in a nice comfortable position in the Russian Market ranking, for example. Angry Birds was probably featured in EVERY blog that deals with Android games.
Some of the top games also have annoying but effective viral marketing components; I've so far avoided stooping to those depths.
Some of them probably had better marketing plans. I'm a programmer, not a marketing expert.
And if someone inside Google decides randomly to feature a game, then it's set. My game WAS featured on AppsLib, a secondary market, and after it was no longer featured it stayed on top of the free apps ranking at #2 for weeks. As in, the #2 downloaded APP, not game.
Unless you know more than anyone else outside of Google about the actual algorithm Google uses to determine how apps rank, you have no clue as to what could have caused a game to fall -- but a huge fall happens the SAME DAY it was pirated.
It's not proof, but it's a very suggestive correlation. Just because it doesn't match your world view doesn't make it garbage. What's indisputable is that the piracy DIDN'T give me a boost in sales OR downloads, which completely invalidates the "piracy is just another kind of marketing" theory.
There's a lot of random luck involved in getting to the top organically, and the process is potentially fragile unless you've got a lot of cross-promotion you can apply from other apps. Or a lot of money to buy ads. I had neither.
Moral questions raised by this are left as an exercise to the reader.
We've seen a few of these (the Burger King Xbox games come to mind). Some of them are actually fun to play.
Unfortunately, this sort of work doesn't come cheap.
The problem with this strategy is that if you're designing a game for an advertiser, they are the ones you have to make happy because they provide the $$$. Users will always be a second priority.
Sorry, but in my eyes, that's actually worse.
Honestly, I think the game industry should be looking for other ways to monetize their content.
Remember how we fixed pirating of games? By making levels non archievable if you are using a pirated version.
I'm not sure what Valve's approach has been. Does it also involves reducing the quality of the games offered by not including LAN play?
An ad with a discount is called a coupon, and you can get piles of them from the paper on Sunday. Or from your junk mail. Or online. I don't think people will consider them to be valuable unless they're categorically better than what you find in the paper.
Or maybe you haven't seen all the ads on the net where you've 'won' a discount by punching a monkey, etc?
We think the players should have the fun they are there to have and will appreciate it when brands add value to that experience vs. get in their way.
Yes it's ironic ;).
however kipp does sound like a good idea - but it might require heavy changes from developers to their game mechanics.
Ubisoft has tried in-game advertisements with several of their Tom Clancy games, and its just about as bad. Yes, I'm going through a casino, turn a corner and there's 5 posters on the wall for Prince of Persia. Riiiiiight.
On the flip-side, I wonder if gun makers have any sort of deals with developers - any teenage boy can probably rattle off the names of 10 different machine guns. The same goes for car brands and Gran Turismo/Forza.