Reprinted from Majaka.net

This is the second in a series of 2 blog posts where we analyze how Ski Champion performed on the Apple App Store. In part 1, we took a look at download numbers. In this post, we will focus on monetization.

Hi again ! Thanks everyone for the kind words. Let’s now look at Ski Champion’s financial performance (or lack thereof), how we explain it, and the lessons we learnt for our next titles.

In the course of over 2 months since its release as an IAP-supported free app, Ski Champion has netted Majaka a grand total of (drum drum drum) …  450 € ! Yup, not missing any K there, that’s 566 US dollars for our American friends. Not the best ROI for a €22,000 project? Well, read on.

Weekly sales, installs and average DAU

We set out to make Ski Champion with the following goals in mind :

From that perspective, Ski Champion exceeded our key expectations (shipped in 2 months, 230K downloads), but didn’t meet the secondary objective.

Our company business plan never accounted for any revenue from Ski Champion,though we certainly did hope for better in our wildest dreams. Because we knew we would make mistakes with this first game, we kept the feature set to a minimum in order to ship quickly, and elected out many possible revenue streams to save on development time.

Let’s now look at our monetization strategy, and have a closer look at how revenue was spread.

We sold playtime and levels

Ski Champion monetizes through In-App Purchases of Coins packs. These Coins can then be used by players for 2 things :

We kept the store to a bare minimum. Players purchase Coins packs with real money. They then use Coins to purchase Ski Pass.

The key idea with the Ski Pass system was to sell items that were both simple to implement, and consumable. We meant to give fans of the game the opportunity to spend large amounts of money if they ever fancied it. A fixed price-point sets 2 barriers, and the power of free-to-play is (in theory) to lift them both: price as a minimum barrier to entry, but also the high cap to how much a player can spend.

We added the option to pay to unlock a slope, because why not, but never expected much from it. As it happens, we have no reliable way of knowing whether the few players that purchased Coins actually used them for Ski Passes or Coins (though we suspect the former). We did set that up in our Flurry analytics, but actual payments were flooded into a sea of fake payments from jailbroken devices. Here we were, thinking piracy would not be a concern since pirates would have never turned into payers anyway!

Freemium is no silver bullet

Now, although we’re okay with Ski Champion not bringing in any significant revenue, it’s fair to say that our monetization strategy didn’t work at all.

With 258 Coins packs sold for 230 000 downloads, Ski Champion has a payer conversion rate of 0.1%.

So there you have it, a warning to our gaming peers. Beware the industry myth according to which, in a freemium game, 1-5% of players will end up spending money. Those are the numbers you typically hear at conferences or in the press here, here, there too, andhey look even in software too. 

Good games can definitely reach those metrics. But farm a product out to fast and brace yourself for disappointment.

Of course, we always knew that Ski Champion would monetize poorly. We just thought that meant edging closer to the lower end of the 1-5% interval. How naive. 

We realize now that it can be a dangerous misconception. Does it stem from the fact that many f2p developers never actually purchase virtual items ? Do we have such a hard time understanding what goes into the mind of a payer, that we just assume an average 1 to 5% of people are crazy enough to spend money pretty much regardless of the game they’re playing?

In retrospect, of course not. This is far from a rant against free-to-play, or against the press. I am glad those numbers are shared. But to reach that 1-5% conversion rate, the game has to be awesome, it has to engage & retain players over a long time, and virtual items have to bring amazing extra value. I hear you : “duh, obviously!”. Well, it was far from obvious to us when we set out to make Ski Champion, and I strongly suspect it still isn’t to many aspiring free-to-play developers.

Freemium is nice but you have to do it properly

Here is our explanation of why Ski Champion monetized so poorly :

So all in all, it was down to a mix of a flawed system and poor implementation. We will definitely apply those bits of learning to our next game.

One thing that *did* work : revenue followed a power curve

IAP prices ranged from €1,59 to €79,99 at launch, and were later halved with no noticeable effect on revenue.

As said earlier, 258 In-App Purchases were made by players, for a total of 450€ in net revenue for Majaka (after Apple’s cut). While these numbers are certainly too small to carry statistical evidence, it’s interesting to note that ~20% of payments accounted for 60% of the revenue.

We take this as proof that it’s important to give players the opportunity to spend as much as they feel.

Could it have gone better?

As with download numbers, there are many ways of monetizing Ski Champion that we intentionnally left out:

Final verdict

We spent 22K€ making Ski Champion. Most of that money was spent on programming and art, things neither myself nor our Creative Director Gaël could do ourselves. The way we see it though, the project brought us much more than €450 :

Such was our plan, from the beginning.

What are we on to now? Why, of course, make more games. Our next title will have a much more serious focus on generating revenue, and will introduce a cool, innovative monetization channel that we can’t wait to try out live. So stay tuned and be sure to follow me on Twitter (@NicolasG_B) or Majaka on Facebook to be kept posted !

Thank-you for reading,

Nicolas

Anything else you would like to know? Do you have experience to share with conversion rates and the freemium model? Let us know in the comments section