Top Tips for Monetizing Your Freemium Game

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Let’s dive right into this today.

The topic is: Using Virtual Currencies in your game to maximize revenue.

 

Rewarding your users:

Using different types of currency allows you to stimulate the games economy as well as the users experience when completing challenging task for instance, you could distribute a type of ‘standard’ currency.  Whereas ‘premium’ currency could only be obtained by spending actual money.

 

An example of types of currency you could distribute are:

• Gold
• Silver
• Bronze

 

Simplifying the Sale:

If a player attempts to make a purchase but lacks the currency needed, be sure to always provide them the option to purchase more virtual currency.  This is a proven method in increasing monetization.

While pricing virtual currency remains challenging task, the folks over at W3i had this to say on the subject,

 

“Providing to many choices will overwhelm the user and increase the likelihood that they will buy the cheapest package.  Below, you can see Imangi provides four price points for currency bundles in Temple Run.  They also apply a bulk discount for larger purchases.  Typically, pricing goods between $2.99 and $49.99 is best for indies.  If you have a large virtual store huge price points like $99.99 can greatly increase revenues, but remember if they return the purchase Apple won’t give back the $30 that they took.  It’s best to A/B test these prices and make sure you’re getting the most revenue out of the pricing structure. “

Micro-transactions vs Macro-transactions what makes more money?

Referring to a report earlier last month by 148 apps,

Microtransactions are not as important as people think for freemium games.  Surprisingly enough, it’s the expensive transactions (Starting at $9.99) that represent the majority of a game’s generated revenue.

AND.. 47% of the revenue earned from in-app purchases fall in the range of $9.99-$19.99.

 

 

User Interface and Navigation:

You always want to make things as few clicks away as possible.  Accessing the in-app store from the main menu through the an “Store Button” (for instance) should be 1 click away.

 

Once you’ve taken into consideration and implemented the aforementioned advise you can start thinking about  optimizing your virtual economy.  Then, (and I suggest) only then, you can think about how to expand your revenue model to add additional monetization methods for the 90% of users that won’t purchase currency.  Ever.

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