作者：Ian Harper

相信不少人都见过Flurry在7月7日发布的以下图表。

App Store付费与免费游戏的收益比例(from Flurry)

免费应用取得领先

对我们这些在App Store中出售付费应用的人而言，这种情况的确让我们感到惊奇并值得重新进行战略思考。市场显然在快速地向前发展，问题在于如何做出应对。在手机游戏运营领域中，6个月无疑是很长的一段时间。

对于Future Games of London工作室而言，我们已经通过体验和付费应用模式取得了巨大的成功，因而转向免费增值模式似乎是一大战略。因为，我们之前似乎将业务构件在了即将灭绝的付费模式上。

今年早期，我们开始尝试在简装版游戏中添加应用内置付费功能（游戏邦注：下文简称IAP）。但是，《Hungry Shark》中的虚拟商品销售似乎并没有取得很大的成效。所以，我们通过调整游戏玩法，出售非消耗型的IAP，比如Mega Shark、Blood Bath和Treasure Map。此举让我们获得了很多用户反馈，很显然用户希望能够对游戏玩法有更多的选择。过去我们不采纳这些意见，因为我们不希望让已经取得成功的核心游戏机制受到影响，但是现在我们认为这种可以随时关闭和开启的选项设置是个很棒的解决方案。GetSetGames也已经在他们的游戏《MegaJump》中证实IAP能够在单人街机游戏中发挥作用，因而免费增值模式并非局限于那些农场游戏。

早期的结果很不寻常，盈利似乎能够一直持续下去，即便数月之后依然能够保持。随后，我们的用户开始要求在付费版本中添加这些内容，于是我们满足了他们的要求。接下来，我们显然应当思考的问题是：如果我们将游戏转变为完全免费来增加用户数量的话，IAP能否产生比付费应用更多的盈利？我们所需要的就是做实验。我们决定在IAP更新发布之时将《Hungry Shark》的第二部分转变为免费模式，如果盈利下滑的话我们就再将它变回付费。下图便是转变带来的结果：

转向免费模式后的营收(from appannie)

销售额一夜之间增加了5倍

我们根本不需要再将游戏变回付费！由于探索频道的鲨鱼周节目（游戏邦注：8月第一周推出）即将来临，再加上游戏第二部分成功获利，我们开始考虑免费发布最新的第三部分。截止7月22日，我们已经在第三部分中添加了IAP选项，但是我们那时决定等鲨鱼周节目开始时再发布游戏，这样便可以最大化推广效果。结果并没有令我们失望（详见下图）。

第三部分收益情况(from appannie)

希望这篇文章能够对那些想过但不知如何实行免费增值模式的开发者有所启发。个人建议马上采用这种模式，付费应用市场已经在与免费增值的比较中落于下风，可以采取行动的时间不多了！（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

HOLDING YOUR BREATH AND GOING FREEMIUM – FUTURE GAMES OF LONDON SHARE SOME STATS

Ian Harper

No doubt you all saw this post by Flurry on 7th July (and Nicholas’s subsequent analysis)

Free Apps take the lead

For those of us selling Paid apps on the App Store, this should prompt an immediate jaw-drop and strategic rethink. The market is clearly moving very quickly, the question is: how to respond? Clearly 6 months in the mobile games business is a long time.

For us at Future Games of London, having had great success with the Lite/Paid app model, ditching that and converting to Freemium was a BIG STEP. We’d built our business on a model that looks about to go extinct!

Earlier in the year we had started to experiment with putting In-App Purchases (IAPs) in our Lite versions. However, shoehorning in a virtual goods economy into Hungry Shark did not make much sense, so we instead went for selling non-consumable IAPs in the form of gameplay modifications: Mega Shark and Blood Bath, then later Treasure Map. We’d had a lot of user feedback on Hungry Shark, and there was clearly an appetite for more variations on how to play the game. We’d resisted these in the past as we’d not wanted to mess with our core game mechanics that had been so successful, but by implementing these as optional extras that could be turned on and off we thought we’d a good solution. GetSetGames had also demonstrated in their title MegaJump that IAPs could work well in a single player arcade game, and so Freemium was not limited to click farming clones.

There were some remarkable early results – the revenue seemed pretty constant, even after months. Then our users started asking for them in the Paid versions, so we obliged. Then the obvious occurred to us – could the IAPs generate more revenue than the Paid app if we increased user volume by removing the price? What we needed was an experiment. By the time the Flurry article came out on the 7th July, our plans were already well advanced. We decided to try converting Hungry Shark – Part 2 to free for a few days when the IAP-enabled Update came out, and to switch it back to paid if it didn’t do the numbers. Here’s what happened:

Sales increased 5x overnight

We had no need to switch it back! It was also coming up to Shark Week again (1st week of August – Thankyou Discovery Channel!), and after the success of Part 2 increasing revenue, we prepared to drop a Shark based nuke on the App Store: making the latest version, Part 3, free. We’d already added the IAPs to Part 3 by the 22nd July, but we decided to hold off until Shark Week in order to maximise the effect. We were not disappointed:

It was at this point we went public with our results, in a gamasutra press release.

Freemium games now

Hope this article helps any developers out there thinking about Freemium but not really sure how to approach it. My advice would be start doing it now, the Paid app market has taken considerable losses already to Freemium, there may not be much time left! Also, if you need any help with marketing and promotion, check our our Future Games Network proposition and this article on the future games network. (Source: Games Brief)