作者：Aaron San Filippo

当我与兄弟Forest创建了Flippfly后，我们花了很长一段时间去制定第一个项目（名为《Monkey Drum》的iOS“教育类”应用）的价格策略。

一方面，这是一款独特的应用（结合了音乐程序和3D角色），拥有非常棒在产品价值，从理论上来看能够有效地区别于其它iOS娱乐应用。另一方面，我们还是一家没有名气的公司。并且我们所面向的“娱乐”应用类别中，大多数成功的应用都属于免费应用。

所以我们最终决定使用免费模式，并在游戏中执行虚拟货币系统，让玩家能够通过演奏乐器而赚得货币，或使用真钱去换取虚拟货币。

我们希望通过创造应用而获得更多用户，并证明我们有能力创造出最高质量的产品。如今我们也成功实现了这两个目标：迄今为止我们的应用已经获得了超过8万名用户，并得到了4.5颗星的评级。这证明用户是真心喜欢这款应用。

我们当然也希望通过应用去赚取巨大的利益，以此支持我们的下一款应用以及游戏今后的更新。但你看本文的标题，便可以得知我们在这方面遭遇了挫折。

可以说游戏的转化率低得可怜，尽管取得了可观的下载量和不错的评级，但是每付费用户平均收益却出奇的低，在游戏发行后几个月我们的总收益还不足500美元。

如今再回顾过去可以发现我们其实犯了不少错误。而我们也可以在其它小型独立开发商身上找到类似的错误。所以我希望在此分享我从这些错误中吸取的经验教训。

如果你想创造出一款有利可图的免费游戏，你就应该避免陷入以下7大误区。

1.未能呈献给用户付钱游戏的充分理由

对于《Monkey Drum》我们的想法是：“如果有效的转化率为1%至3%，也许我们可以通过取悦用户而达到这一目标。”但是当我们进一步思考有效的免费游戏设计时，我们越发觉得这种方法并不可行。你希望用户喜欢你的应用，但与此同时你也必须提供他们想要的内容。当然也会出现少量善良的玩家会因为支持或欣赏你的作品而买单，但是事实上，如果你不能提供玩家真正想要的内容，你的游戏转化率便有可能跌至最低点。

就像在《Monkey Drum》中，我们提供了一些额外的乐器和角色定制工具，同时我们也提供了虚拟货币让玩家可以去换取这些内容，这算是一种有趣的方法，不像“刷任务”那样烦人。但是最后许多玩家都失去了消费冲动，因为他们认为基本产品所包含的道具已经非常有趣，足够他们享受好几个小时的游戏乐趣。

有些免费游戏的设置就非常巧妙，如创造了所谓的“付费磁石”——让玩家在“升级”时能够支出更多虚拟货币（游戏邦注：PopCap的《Zuma Blitz》便是一个经典的例子）。还有一些有效的方法，如不只提供游戏动机，还提供各种能够满足玩家虚荣心的道具，额外内容等等。

不管你的策略是什么，请一定要保持游戏乐趣与玩家想要看到的内容间的平衡。如果玩家认为自己已经经历了完整的游戏体验，或者可以通过游戏过程去获得游戏道具，他们便不会愿意为游戏掏腰包。

2.忽视“鲸鱼”元素

归根结底，免费游戏盈利是一种非常简单的公式。你的收益将等于终身价值（LTV：付费用户为了玩整款游戏所支出的费用）乘以转化率（玩家在应用内部的消费）再乘以总体下载量。

也就是：

收益=LTVx转化率x下载量

聪明的开发者将意识到，用户的终身价值便决定着他们的最大支出。如果支出上限为1美元（也许这就是你所要求的“完整版本”的费用），你便需要获得更大的转化率，基于如此低的LTV，你便只能祈求游戏能够获得较高的病毒传播，否则你用于获取用户的成本将大大超越投资利润率。

实际上，免费游戏的盈利很大程度取决于“鲸鱼用户”——即那些愿意在应用上投入高额成本的用户。不管你的应用多出色，肯定存在一些下载了应用但却从不去玩它的用户。在那些愿意玩应用的用户中，有些也只是只会玩一次应用。而在那些会尝试应用并为它花钱的用户中，许多也都只愿意花一次钱。

你最关心的总是那些离开了应用的用户。如果你不断提供一些动机让用户为你的应用掏钱，便会推动部分用户将玩你的游戏当成自己日常生活的一部分，从而有效地提高游戏的LTV，并帮助你获得更高的收益。

对于《Monkey Drum》，我们就是忽视了这一点。说实话，我们并不是很喜欢“鲸鱼用户”这一定义，特别是当我们的应用主要是面向儿童玩家时，当然了我们也听说过有些儿童曾在虚拟货币上投入了数百元的成本。我们在应用中设置了一种可消费的道具，即香蕉，让玩家可以用其喂养自己的角色。但是为了不让玩家觉得我们过于邪恶，我们决定提供一种较为简单的方法让玩家能够获得足够货币并找到更多香蕉（我们甚至还为了让家长们放心而故意减弱了应用内部购买元素），所以最终我们的玩家们的确非常喜欢整个游戏过程，但却也不会为了打开这些道具而花钱。

3.未能引导用户付费

让我们再次回到转化率问题上。我们经常会忘记一个事实，即用户们总是很容易忽视那些你认为理所应当的事物。举个例子来说吧，如果在应用中消费的唯一方法是按压菜单上的“商店”按键（但却未植入主要的游戏周期中），而许多玩家总是略过这一按键而直接按压“游戏”。

这也是为什么像《Triple Town》等游戏选择将虚拟道具购买直接设置在教程中的主要原因——他们希望所有玩家都能意识到这一功能的存在，并希望他们清楚如何（以及为什么）去使用它。

更不用说那些在免费游戏中取得巨大成功的公司，他们总是会使用各种分析（游戏邦注：如Google Analytics或Flurry）去明确有多少用户进入了商店，并根据这些数据进行适当的游戏调整。例如菜单中的按钮放置和颜色设定都将很大程度地影响着用户行为。

我知道对于那些重视游戏玩法的开发者来说这些内容简直微不足道。但是我并不是让你们放弃游戏玩法。因为你如果你制作的是一款免费游戏，而你又不清楚如何引导用户进行消费，你便很难从游戏中谋取巨大的利益。

4.截断了游戏的后路

这也是关于终身价值和转化率的问题。大多数付费用户都不会在前两次游戏时便掏腰包。同时你也需要记住，在所有付费用户中，最有价值的便是那些愿意反复回到游戏中并不断花钱的用户。

如果你为应用设置了固定的内容（如带有30个关卡的益智游戏），你便放走了大多数有价值的用户，并破坏了LTV的发展。当然也存在例外。但是当我们着眼于最畅销的免费游戏排行榜单时会发现，大多数游戏都带有不断更新的游戏机制以及最棒的应用内部购买设置，即让玩家能够通过购买虚拟货币而长时间体验更多新机制。

5.制作出一款平凡的游戏

这一点非常关键。就像在早前盛行包装零售货物时期，制作人们总是会竭力避免创造出任何平凡的产品，所以他们总是愿意在包装上大费功夫。而在付费应用市场也是如此（但是这里的用户显得更加精明，也就是不只会根据外包装去判断产品的价值，还会浏览其他用户所给予的评价）。

平凡的免费游戏不可能为开发者带来任何利益。当然也有例外——因为质量判断也很主观，很难真正进行衡量。但是你肯定需要创造出一款用户喜欢的应用。如果很少用户喜欢你的应用，便不会有人愿意谈论它，这样就会导致更少人愿意为它花钱了。关于免费应用最棒的一点便是你可以创造一个瞄准小众市场的应用，并且该应用还必须具有自己的独特魅力，同时确保这一独特魅力能够长时间吸引用户的注意。这便是你最先需要考虑的内容，也是最难做到的一点。

6.未能有效地测试与迭代

我们必须意识到，比起付费游戏，免费游戏更容易错失更多机遇。基于付费应用，你便能在用户下载时赚得应有的收益（即使下载用户未曾打开过应用）。而基于免费应用，你不仅需要通过应用理念以及应用商店描述去吸引用户的注意，你还需要在用户掏腰包前尽可能地取悦他们。随后你需要提供给他们购买应用的充分理由，引导着他们如何消费，并推动他们进行反复消费。如果整个过程中的某一环出现了问题，你便很难从中赚得利益。

测试游戏玩法还不够，你同时需要测试整个循环过程。那些在免费游戏中取得成功的公司总是能在游戏发行前进行反复测试，并将发行作为产品生命的起点，在明确产品是否可行前不断使用各种分析和商业经验去完善其核心参数。

尽管我们在开发《Monkey Drum》时也进行了迭代测试，但说实话，我们本来可以做得更好的。即当我们发现大多数用户找不到商店时，我们便可以通过改变UI去解决这一问题。但是不幸的是，这并不是导致《Monkey Drum》盈利失败的最大原因。让我们看下下一点。

7.未能理解用户

当我们确定了使用免费模式时，我们认为年轻的用户将会喜欢这种免费的打鼓模式，并与角色进行亲密互动，而以此吸引更多用户去使用音序器等音乐创造工具。我们想象着通过吸引用户使用音乐创造工具而赚取利益，即不管是小孩还是成人都将购买更多额外的乐器去创造更多优秀的音乐。

但是当游戏发行后，我们意识到游戏的最大用户却是儿童玩家，而他们最喜欢的活动只是打鼓，所以根本不存在购买其它乐器的动机。

就像我之前提过的，我们不希望表现得太过“邪恶”。在应用最初发行时我们便在应用描述中明确提及了应用内部购买模式。但是事实上，教育类音乐应用的用户总是少于一般的游戏用户，特别是那些具有儿童玩家所喜欢的审美元素的应用便拥有更局限的用户，甚至很难去推动应用内部购买的发展。

尽管这些用户真心喜欢我们的应用，但是我们却很难引导他们走进商店，也就是对于他们来说，下载量和LTV比值对于游戏收益的影响并不具有任何意义。所以现在我们认为这是一种错误的商业模式。

扭转局面

在经过几个月的UI完善，添加了角色定制系统，并获得苹果的推荐以及一些网站的评论后，《Monkey Drum》的收益仍然十分惨淡。所以我们便开始思考：何不发行一款预先付钱，而舍弃应用内部购买机制的高级版本？我们将让用户能够更容易获得应用内部货币，并删除购买额外货币的选择。同时我们也仍会将游戏设定为教育类别，因为这是最能体现这款游戏魅力的设定。

显然这一“高级”版本取得了不错的成绩，它得到了苹果关于（教育类）新款以及值得关注的游戏类别的推荐（长达四周），这比之前游戏所获得的推荐更棒，并能够帮助我们有效地突显于其它iOS应用中并获得更大的利益。

尽管这并不是多了不起的成功，但是它比之前的免费版本所获得的收益整整多出了20倍。我们相信这是一种有效的方法，因为应用本身便具有非常大的吸引力，而我们能够在之后将用户从免费版本推向高级版本，并且如果用户厌烦了应用内部购买，我们也会帮助他们转向高级版本。基本看来这便是一种简化/完整的版本模式，但却带有一定的革新内容。

如果你计划推出一款带有付费升级内容的免费游戏，我便会建议你同时也发行一个独立的付费版本。因为如果你的应用拥有较高的排名并非常有趣，用户便会乐意提前支付2.99美元的费用。

但是如果你推出的是免费版本的游戏，你便需要重视整个执行过程，任何一环除了差错，你的用户便不可能为你的游戏买单。如果你全面衡量的话便会发现这是一种有关统计的问题。

就像在我们的例子中，创建独立的“高级版本”大约花费了2周的时间——这是值得投入的时间。它同时还让我们能够通过苹果编辑团队的审查（基于N&N功能），从而帮助我们更有效地进军世界各地的应用商店。

总结

在阅读了上述内容后，比起规划自己的下一款免费游戏，你可能会受到某些元素的驱使而决定改变方向。其实我们也是如此。

我们不喜欢围绕着“鲸鱼”用户去运行游戏；我们不喜欢只有3%的用户将完整地体验游戏，而剩下97%的用户只会在我们“设置合理”时才注意到游戏。

我们同样也不喜欢忽视游戏本身而投入大量的时间去分析并调整用户流。我们特别不希望付费用户不断抱怨着在无止尽的微交易中投入越来越多的现金，但却始终难以感到满足。我们也希望创造出能让玩家难忘且独特的游戏体验，但是游戏内部盈利却总是会阻碍我们实现这一目标。

这些原因在很大程度上影响着我们主要注意力的转移（从手机平台转向其它平台）。我们真心为《Monkey Drum》感到骄傲。我们一直坚持把握住道德关卡，并吸引了8万多名用户，尽管这些用户大多属于5至7岁的儿童玩家，我们也从未抱怨过之前所设定的应用内部购买模式。我们并不相信免费游戏就是“邪恶的”。但是当我们真正着眼于免费游戏所创造的盈利结果时，我们最终还是决定将更注意力转向创造其它更出色的游戏。

所以我们转向了PC平台，在这里我们能够找到更加强大的玩家社区，比起在游戏中零碎地购买各种道具，这些玩家们更乐意提前消费。我们即将在PC平台上发行的第一款游戏《Race The Sun》售价大约为10美元，并且与《我的世界》一样也设有早期购买折扣。我们将基于在免费游戏中吸取的经验教训而率先推出免费样本，并在之后推出付费版本。

我想这是我们到目前为止所作出的最明智的决定。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

7 Ways to Fail at Free-to-Play

by Aaron San Filippo

When my brother Forest and I started Flippfly, we struggled for a long time over the pricing strategy for our first project, an ios “Edutainment” app called Monkey Drum.

On one hand, it was unique (it’s a combination of a musical sequencer with 3D characters) and it had great production values that would, in theory, set it apart from the average iOS entertainment app. On the other hand, we were completely unknown as a company. We were also releasing into the “Entertainment” category, and most of the successful apps there were free.

So we eventually decided that Monkey Drum would be free-to-play, and that we would implement a virtual currency system where users could earn coins through playing musical instruments, or buy the virtual currency in chunks for real money.

Two of our goals for the app were to gain users and to prove that we could produce a top-quality product. We largely succeeded at these goals: To date the app has been downloaded over by over 80,000 users, and has a 4.5-star rating. Users love it.

Of course, we also hoped that the app would turn a decent profit, perhaps funding the next project and allowing continued updates for some time. From the title of the article, you may have guessed by now that we failed in this regard.

The conversion rate was pathetic, and the average revenue per paying user was low enough that despite its decent download numbers and great review scores, we had achieved less than $500 in revenue after several months.

In retrospect, the mistakes we made are obvious. But since this time, we’ve seen these mistakes repeated by others, often small indies like us. So I’d like to share what we’ve learned and observed. Learn from our mistakes!

So, here are seven things you should do if you want to doom your free-to-play project to almost certain financial failure.

1. Fail to Give Users Great Reasons To Pay

Our thinking with Monkey Drum went something like this: “If a good conversion rate is something like 1-3 percent, maybe we can achieve that by delighting our users into wanting to give us more.” The more we look at effective F2P design and contrasted it with our app, the more we realize that this doesn’t work in reality. Your users need to love your app — but you need to leave them wanting more. Sure, there will be a small percentage of philanthropists who will give you a few bucks to support you as a developer or out of pure appreciation, but generally speaking, you need to leave people wanting, or your conversion rate will probably round down to zero.

With Monkey Drum, we provided reasons to pay in the form of additional instrument unlocks and, eventually, character customization items — but we also provided them with a means of unlocking the virtual currency to buy these items, and this method was actually a lot of fun and not terribly “grindy.” In the end, a lot of our players probably don’t have that urge to spend because they’re always having lots of fun, and because the items included with the base product provide hours of entertainment.

Some very effective F2P games are clever and calculating in how they create this “pay magnet” — often by giving you opportunities to spend more and more virtual currency as you “level up” (Zuma Blitz from PopCap is a good example.) Others succeed by pure variety: by providing not only gameplay incentives, but vanity items, extra content, etc.

Whatever your strategy, please realize that you have to find a perfect balance between delight, and leaving users wanting more. If they feel that they have a complete experience, or a reasonable means to unlock these items through gameplay, they will probably not pay for more.

2. Ignore the “Whale” Factor

Free-to-play monetization is fairly simple mathematics when it comes down to it. Your revenue will be LTV (lifetime value: the average amount a paying user will spend over the entirely of playing your game) times the conversion rate (the number of people who will spend anything on your app) times the total downloads.

Just keep that formula in mind:

Revenue = LTV x Conversion x Downloads.

Astute developers will realize that the lifetime value of a user is capped at whatever the maximum possible spend is. If this cap is $1 or so (maybe you charge to unlock the “full version”) then you need a great conversion rate, and with such a low LTV, you’ll need to be lucky enough to achieve virality, because the cost to acquire users by any paid method would exceed the return on investment.

The truth is: free-to-play works in large part because of “whales” — users who spend significant money in your app. No matter how good your app is, there will be a percentage who download it and never play it. Of those who play it, there will be a percentage that just plays once. Of those who really get into it and pay for something, many will only pay once.

What you care most about about are those who are left. If you provide continual motivation to spend money, then the “burning core” — that subset of customers for whom this is the best app ever and part of their daily routine — will push up this LTV to the point that it can start to make sense financially.

With Monkey Drum, we failed here. To be honest, we really hated the idea of “whales” — especially given that our app was primarily for children, and we were hearing all the horror stories about kids spending hundreds on virtual currency. We had one consumable item in the app — a bunch of bananas you can feed to the characters. But in our determination to not be evil, we provided a fairly easy means of earning enough coins to unlock more bananas — not to mention our clear message to parents about how to disable in-app purchases — and it turns out that most of our audience really enjoys the process of playing the instruments and unlocking these.

3. Fail to Guide Users to Payment

This goes back to your conversion rate. It’s easy to forget, after working on your labor of love for a year or so, that the average user will probably miss all of the things you think are obvious. For instance, if the only method of spending cash in your app is through a “store” button in your menu (and not implanted somewhere in the main play cycle) then the truth is, many players will never see it because they’re going straight to “Play.”

There is a reason that games like Triple Town integrate virtual item purchases right into their tutorial — you want everyone to know it’s there, and to know how (and why) they would want to use it.

It also goes without saying that the companies that succeed at F2P almost universally use analytics (such as Google Analytics or Flurry) to determine exactly how many of their users are landing in the store — and they’re tuning this flow continually. Something like the placement and color of your buttons in the menu can have a surprisingly large effect on user behavior.

I understand that these things feel so minor when you’re focused on the gameplay. And don’t interpret what I’m saying to mean that you shouldn’t focus on gameplay (see my plea here.) But if you’re making a F2P game, you need to care about how well you’re guiding users into purchases, if you hope to be financially successful.

4. Give Your Game an End

Again, this goes back to lifetime value and conversion rate. Most paying users aren’t going to give you money the first time they play your app, or even the second time. And remember that of those users who do invest — the most valuable are those who come back and make repeat payments.

If your app has a fixed amount of content — for example, a puzzle game with 30 levels — then you’re essentially cutting off your most valuable users, and your LTV will suffer. There are, of course, exceptions. But take a look at any F2P top-grossing chart, and you’re going to find mostly games with evergreen mechanics, and the top IAPs will mostly be virtual currency to fuel this play over a long period of time.

5. Make a Mediocre Game

This one should go without saying, and probably should have come first in my list, since it’s the most important. In the “bad old days” of retail packaged goods, you could get away with a mediocre product to a certain degree, as long as the box was pretty. And in the paid app marketplace, this is still true (but to a much lesser extent, since users tend to be more savvy and the user reviews are right there to read).

But mediocre free-to-play games do not succeed financially. Oh sure, there are exceptions — and since quality is so subjective, it’s a hard thing to prove. But you absolutely need to create a game that has a set of users who love it. If few people love it, few will talk about it, and even fewer will stick around to pay. One of the cool things about free-to-play is that you can make a living with a niche app — but it still needs that burning core, and that burning core needs to stay engaged for a long time. This is your first priority, and is also the hardest thing to get right!

6. Fail To Test and Iterate

It’s important to realize that there are a lot more opportunities to fail with a F2P app than there are with a paid app. With a paid app, you’ve earned the revenue at the moment of download, even if the user never launches it. With F2P, Not only do you need to grab users with your app’s concept and presentation in the app store, but you need to delight them before they spend a cent. And then you need to give them a great reason to spend money, and to guide them through this process, and then get them to repeat it. If anything in this process breaks down, it’s going to kill your revenue potential.

It’s not enough to test your gameplay — you need to test the whole loop. Companies that succeed at F2P test extensively before launch, and then treat the release as the beginning of a product’s life, using analytics and business experience to improve their core metrics until the product has either proven viability, or is abandoned.

With Monkey Drum, we tried here, but honestly could have done better. We learned fairly on that most users weren’t finding the store, and were able to improve this significantly through some UI changes. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to be the biggest factor in Monkey Drum’s failure to monetize, which leads to the next point…

7. Fail to Understand Your Audience

When we chose to make Monkey Drum free-to-play, we had this idea that the very young users would probably enjoy the free-play drum mode and interacting with the characters, and a much wider audience would get into the sequencer and music creation tools. We imagined a community of users materializing around the song creation tools, and kids and adults alike wanting to purchase additional instruments to create more expressive creations.

Only after we shipped, however, did we realize that our biggest audience was very young children — and that their favorite activity was playing the drums, which didn’t have much incentive to pay.

As I mentioned earlier, we went out of our way to not be “evil.” We clearly mentioned the in-app purchases in the app description and when the app first launched. The hard truth is, educational music apps have a much smaller audience than games. And educational music apps with a specific aesthetic that appeals to young children have an even more limited audience — and one that we suspect doesn’t drive many IAPs in any situation.

Despite being an almost universally loved app, and going out of our way to guide users into our store, the downloads and LTV portions of the revenue equation just didn’t make sense with this audience. We believe now that it was the wrong business model altogether.

Turning it Around

After several months of tuning the UI in Monkey Drum, adding a character customization system, being featured by Apple, and being reviewed by several sites, the app was still failing financially. At this point, we had a thought: Why not release a separate, “deluxe” version for an up-front price, without the in-app-purchase? We would tune the in-app currency earn rate to be even more forgiving, and simply remove the option to buy additional currency. We would also put it in the Education category, as this seemed to be where it was appreciated the most.

This “Deluxe” version worked out considerably better for us — Apple featured it in the New and Noteworthy (Education category) for four weeks, a better featured slot than the original had ever achieved, and we were able to earn better than the average iOS app.

It was still not a smashing success, but it easily made 20 times or so what the free version did. We believe this worked out for us because the app itself was very appealing and fun, and we were able to drive customers from the free-to-play version to Deluxe with a launch popup, and from the in-app store where we suggest that users may want to check out the deluxe version if they don’t want to bother with IAPs. It was basically the lite/full version model, but kind of retrofitted in.

I would suggest that if your plan is to release your app as “free-to-try” with a paid upgrade to the full version, then please, please consider releasing a separate paid version as well. There is a large portion of users who will gladly pay you $2.99 upfront if the app is highly rated and looks entertaining.

But if all you have is a free version, a large portion of these otherwise willing customers will be lost in the long path from download, to play, to delight, to desire for more, to payment. It’s just a matter of statistics, if you think it through.

In our case, building the “Deluxe” version as a separate app took us perhaps two weeks; it was well worth the time. It also gave us a fresh pass at Apple’s editorial team (which paid off in the form of a N&N feature) and allowed us more visibility worldwide in various pockets of the app store. It’s all about visibility.

A Note on Flippfly

Perhaps you’ve read through this list, and rather than identifying an action plan for your next F2P game, you’ve spotted some patterns that kind of turn you off. This was the case with us as well.

We don’t like the idea that “whales” are what we need to sustain our games. We don’t like the idea that only 3 percent or so of our users will ever experience our games in their fullest, and that the other 97 percent will probably be left wanting, if we’re “doing it right.”

We also don’t like the idea of spending a significant portion of our time analyzing and tuning our user flow towards an in-game store, rather than focusing on the game itself. And we especially don’t like the idea that even our paying customers will be nagged for additional money in a never-ending cycle of microtransactions that never quite satisfy. We want to build memorable and unique gaming experiences, and in-game monetization — in its most effective form — seems to always get in the way of that out of necessity.

These reasons form a large part of why we changed our direction as a company away from mobile as our primary focus. We’re very proud of Monkey Drum. We went out of our way to be ethical with it, and with over 80,000 users, we have never had a single complaint about the in-app purchases, despite our core audience being five to seven year olds. And we don’t believe that F2P is necessarily “evil.” But when we looked at the reality of what it takes to really thrive in free-to-play, we decided that we’d rather be able to focus more of our time on making great games.

So we made the decision to refocus ourselves on the PC platform, where there is still a thriving community of gamers who are willing (indeed, who often prefer) to pay for their games upfront rather than piecemeal. Our first major game release, Race The Sun, will ship for PC for somewhere around $10, with an early purchase discount much like that of Minecraft. It will have a free-to-try demo with many of the lessons we’ve learned from our F2P experiment, and a paid mobile version will come later — if it makes sense.

We couldn’t be happier with this decision so far.(source:gamasutra)