苹果App Store中的游戏价格之争往往沦为一场“持久战”，只要看看这个应用商店付费游戏的头阵，就知道基本上是99美分游戏唱主角，仅有少数超过5美元的游戏有幸跻身这一行列。

开发商的游戏如何在如此众多的低价游戏中脱颖而出？对一些人而言，答案很简单，那就是向用户提供免费下载服务。但这果真是行之有效的策略吗？游戏内置付费功能和广告赞助方式，究竟是否比一次性付费下载更容易创造营收？

对此问题，至少游戏开发商Get Set Games、Newtoy、Ngmoco三个公司的回答是肯定的。

内置付费功能和虚拟货币

Get Set Games工作室的第三部作品《Mega Jump》（该游戏最近的用户人数已超过600万）刚刚推出时并不提供免费下载，它在应用商店售价99美分，在该团队看来，它当初的销售额还算乐观，而且是最有特色的苹果手机游戏之一。

Mega Jump

后来手机社交游戏平台OpenFeint也开始与Get Set合作，在该平台进行限时促销活动，定期在某一天提供该游戏的免费下载版本，极大刺激了这款游戏的下载量。

Get Set工作室的联合创始人之一马特·库姆（Matt Coombe）表示，“我们把它设置成免费后，三天内就创造了100万下载量，这个数据非常惊人，然后我们看到它的排名开始上升，因为这款游戏里头还有少量内置付费功能，所以它们的销售额也随之飙升，很显然，更多用户意味着更多内置功能消费……但是我们发现，免费促销活动之后，游戏销售额又立即回落，几乎跌回了标价99美分时期的情况。但是游戏内置付费功能的销售却仍然强劲，因为我们在促销时期虏获了大量下载这款游戏的用户。”

重新将价格调整到99美分后，Get Set又故伎重施，在OpenFeint平台将这款游戏的免费促销时间延长至一周，结果可想而知，游戏下载量和内置付费功能的销量又是一路高歌。

最后，Get Set干脆决定将这款游戏设置为永久性免费，库姆表示，“事实证明，这款游戏靠免费下载和内置付费功能销售，远比游戏本身的付费下载更能创造营收。”

在彻底转向免费之前，《Mega Jump》的每日下载量约1000次，内置付费功能几乎占游戏总利润的三分之一。

现在这款游戏已经完全免费，每日下载量更是猛涨到3.5至4万次之间，尽管ARPU（每用户平均消费）仅5至10美分左右，但庞大的用户基数还是让这款游戏利润丰厚。

Mega Jump

除了价格调整外，这款游戏内置付费功能的交易方式也随之改变。该游戏原先仅支持用户通过现实货币购买人物新形象等道具，但收到负面用户反馈后，Get Set决定转换策略。因为玩家可以通过玩游戏收集虚拟货币，所以Get Set就宣布用户可以使用虚拟货币购买道具或进行升级，用户要先购买虚拟货币，才能获得游戏道具。

库姆称，“我们之前有想过，让用户通过玩游戏收集虚拟货币，免费获得道具的做法，会对我们的营收有所影响，事实证明它确实产生了负面效应，用户更愿意花钱买虚拟货币，然后再使用这些货币开启一些游戏功能，而不是直接拿钱购买道具，因为这种操作有点令人不快。”

广告赞助和多人游戏模式

虽然对一些游戏来说，内置付费功能很管用，但这一法则并非放之四海皆准。

对手机游戏《Words With Friends》和《With Friends》系列的开发商Newtoy公司而言，游戏植入广告才是更有力的创收工具。它的游戏和《Mega Jump》一样，最初面世时都是付费游戏。

该工作室的第一款游戏《Chess With Friends》最初售价5美元，但成效并不如Newtoy所预期的那般理想，下载量并不高。于是Newtoy决定将这款游戏设置为完全免费，然后再从用户基数中入手，增加营收。

现在这款游戏提供了两种可选择的版本，一个是标价2.99美元的付费版本，另一个是免费的广告赞助版本。事实上，光靠广告赞助的免费版本就已经够Newtoy赚上一笔了，但该工作室总设计师凯文·霍姆（Kevin Holme）表示，推出另一个付费版本，是为了让游戏营收“锦上添花”。

Words With Friends

继《Chess With Friends》之后，Newtoy又推出了另一款游戏《Words With Friends》，这款游戏现在的付费版和免费版每月营收已超100万美元，每月活跃用户是500万人，相当于用户每月玩游戏的时间是2.5亿分钟，每月广告印象是10亿次。

据霍姆所称，这款游戏的价格机制之所以获得成功，是因为它专注于多人游戏模式，“我们不支持单人游戏模式，如果你想玩这款游戏，除了多人游戏模式以外别无选择。你可以和一个随机对手玩游戏，但我们主张你跟多个用户一起体验游戏……我们确实不认为自己放弃人工智能的单人游戏模式有何不妥，这也是我们成功的原因之一：彻底放弃单人游戏模式。多人游戏模式帮助我们收获了更多用户，通过口碑营销推广游戏。用户初次下载这款游戏只是因为看到它显示在游戏列表上，他们不知道要和谁一起玩游戏，就会怂恿自己的朋友来试试看，这样他们就会一块玩这款游戏。”

用户服务意识

本文所举列游戏的共同之处在于，它们的开发商都重视聆听用户心声，然后再根据用户反馈对游戏进行定期更新。一个快乐的用户等于一个乐于消费的用户。将游戏视为服务而非单纯的产品，这种理念早已被手机游戏开发商和发行商Ngmoco公司奉为重要的运营法则。

Ngmoco市场营销副总裁克莱夫·唐尼（Clive Downie）表示，“我们在2009年中期就已经意识到，游戏的未来价值在于与用户保持长期联系，以通过各种方式让这种互动关系创造营收，这种关系的主心骨就是服务意识。”

所以Ngmoco决定将来推出的游戏全部免费，依靠多种游戏内置付费功能和广告赞助创收。

据唐尼所言，这种战略调整获利颇丰。他们免费游戏的下载量是付费游戏的10到15倍，仅靠活跃用户中的2%玩家，就能成功实现非常可观的营收。

ngmoco's We Rule

他还强调，保证用户留存率和用户消费的要诀仍然是倾听用户的需求，定期优化游戏体验，“我们历来重视倾听用户群体的需求，以便了解如何创造可增加收益、久经考验、更有趣味的游戏内容和服务，除了服务意识、收益和游戏黏性以外，最重要的一点是：我们从来不曾忘记，必须为成百上千万的用户创造优质、出色的娱乐体验。这是Ngmoco的核心价值观。”

Ngmoco希望将这一观念灌输到他们与开发商伙伴的合作过程和Android平台的业务中，他们正与新东家DeNA合作打造一个新的全球社交网站平台，目前该平台正处于内部开发测试中。

结论：

尽管将游戏设置为完全免费可能有违运营计划，但对许多开发商来说，这种方式却远比直接付费下载获利更大。包括本文提及的许多案例都足以证实，更大规模的潜在用户群体或者更多广告印象次数，就意味着更大营收，即使这些用户平均消费额仅几美分而已。

唐尼还表示，“长期而成功的游戏黏性，远比一次性付费下载更容易大幅创收。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Going Free In The App Store – Success Stories

Pricing for games on Apple’s App Store has frequently been described as a “race to the bottom”. A look at the top paid games reveals a list that’s full of 99 cent titles, with only the rare game charting with a price tag of $5 or more.

So how do you make your game stand out in a field full of lower priced apps? For some, the answer is simple: give it away for free. But is this strategy viable? Can in-app purchase and advertising make up for an actual price tag?

For at least three developers, the answer appears to be yes.

Jumping For Coins

When Get Set Games originally released Mega Jump — which just recently passed the six million user plateau — the game wasn’t free.

As the studio’s third release, Mega Jump was priced at $0.99 when it launched in the app store. The team achieved what they describe as “decent sales,” and at one point Mega Jump was one of Apple’s featured games.

Eventually, mobile social network platform OpenFeint approached Get Set about a limited time offer, which would make the game free for one day only, coupled with heavy promotion. It was an immediate success.

“We set it free and it got a million downloads in three days, which is exceptional,” explains co-founder Matt Coombe. “And so we saw our ranks go up and also we have a small amount of in-app purchases available, and we saw their sales just go through the roof right away. It was clear that more people equals more in-app purchases.

“But we found that our sales figures dipped almost immediately after the promotion. Despite getting a million people when it was free, as soon as it went back to just 99 cents, sales slumped almost immediately back to roughly where they were before. But the in-app purchases stayed strong, because we had a large community of people that had downloaded during that period.”

After reverting back to the 99 cent price point, the studio eventually made the game free once again, as part of an OpenFeint promotion, for an entire weekend — which led to yet another increase in both downloads and in-app purchases.

Finally Get Set decided to simply make the game free to download once and for all. “It just turned out that we could make much, much greater revenue by giving it away and selling in-app purchases then trying to sell the app itself,” says Coombe.

Prior to making the shift to free, Mega Jump was seeing approximately 1,000 downloads per day and in-app purchases accounted for nearly a third of the game’s profit.

Now that the game bears no price tag, downloads have skyrocketed to between 35 to 40,000 per day. And even though the average revenue per user is only approximately between five and ten cents,the sheer number of users makes this strategy much more profitable.

In addition to the pricing of the game, the in-app purchases themselves have changed along the way as well. Initially the game allowed users to purchase items, such as new characters, with real money.

But after receiving negative feedback, Get Set decided to change things around. Since players were already collecting coins in the game, the studio decided that those coins should be used for purchasing items and upgrades. And instead of buying those items directly, users could purchase virtual currency.

“We kind of thought that might actually hit us in terms of revenue a little bit, by allowing people to get stuff for free by just collecting coins in the game, but it actually had the opposite effect,” says Coombe. “People are much more likely to purchase a virtual currency and use that to unlock stuff than they are to purchase items directly, which was mind-blowing.”

With a Little Help from My Friends

While in-app purchases work for some games, the technique doesn’t necessarily lend itself all that well to every game.

For Newtoy Inc., the developer behind Words With Friends and the associated With Friends series of games, in-app advertising has proven to be a much more effective tool. But like Mega Jump,these games weren’t always free.

The studio’s first release, Chess With Friends, was initially 5 dollars, but wasn’t getting the kind of traction that Newtoy wanted. The number of downloads simply wasn’t high enough.

So the studio decided that it would make the game completely free, and then determine how to make money from it once the audience was there.

Now the game is available in two different flavors: a $2.99 paid version and a free ad-supported version. But having a free game with advertising was enough to support the studio. The paid version, meanwhile, is what lead designer Kevin Holme describes as “icing on the cake.”

Newtoy followed the release of Chess With Friends with Words With Friends, a game that features an identical, multi-SKU pricing structure. The iPhone version of that game is currently making over $1 million in revenue each month between both the paid and free versions.

The game has five million monthly active users, which amounts to over 250 million minutes of gameplay and one billion ad impressions each month.

According to Holme, one of the driving factors behind the game’s success with this pricing technique is its focus on multiplayer gameplay.

Newtoy’s Words With Friends

“We don’t have a single-player element,” explains Holme. “The only way you can play is through multiplayer, so if you’re interested in playing the game you don’t really have any other option.

You can play with a random opponent, but we really push you to play with other people.”

“We actually think that we didn’t make a mistake by leaving out an AI single-player mode. That’s one of the reasons for our success: leaving the single-player out entirely.

“It certainly helps our acquisitions and spreading it through word of mouth. All the people that download it for the first time just because they saw it on the games list, they don’t know anyone to play against yet, so they tell their friends to try it out, so they can play together.”

Turning Games into a Service

What these games have in common is that the creators are constantly listening to feedback from their users and then implementing that feedback into the game through frequent updates. A happy customer is a paying customer. This shift from viewing games as a service instead of a product is something that mobile developer and publisher Ngmoco was able to spot relatively early on.

“We realized in mid-2009 that the real future value was in maintaining a relationship with a consumer over a lengthy period,” says the company’s vice president of marketing, Clive Downie. “To monetize the engagement that results from the relationship in many ways. The backbone of that relationship should be a service.”

That wasn’t always the case, as Ngmoco got its start by releasing a number of popular paid games like Rolando and Topple. But, like Newtoy, the company found that it simply wasn’t reaching a large enough audience, in spite of the relative success of those games.

So the decision was made to make all future releases free and supported by various in-app purchases and advertising.

According to Downie, the shift has been a profitable one. With downloads of free games ranging from between 10 and 15 times larger than those of paid, Ngmoco is able to achieve an acceptable level of success by monetizing a baseline of only two percent of daily active users.

And again, the key to keeping users coming back and spending money is listening to them and regularly improving the game experience.

“We are constantly listening to communities to understand how we can provide content and services that can increase that yield and at the same time increase duration and enjoyment in the game,” says Downie. “Bottom line, after all the talk of services, yield, engagement: we don’t lose sight of the fact that we have to make good, compelling entertainment that appeals to and delights tens of millions of people. That’s at the core of Ngmoco.”

Ngmoco’s We Rule Quests

The company is hoping to soon expand this philosophy to both development partners and the Android platform, with a new global social network created in conjunction with new owner DeNA, which is currently in a closed developer beta.

In Conclusion

While giving a game away for free may make for a counterintuitive business plan, for many developers it’s much more profitable than charging for it. In many instances, including the three outlined here, having a substantially larger audience purchasing in-app items or viewing ads means more revenue for the developer, even if those users are only spending an average of a few cents each.

This strategy doesn’t provide the instant gratification that a paid app does. Instead, it requires a forward looking perspective that has the potential to be significantly more profitable.

“Over the long term successfully monetizing engagement pays back more than monetizing once at the point of download,” says Downie.（source:gamasutra）