How playing "The Way Home" earns us revenue by mining Bitcoin

Because of the nature of our newest title, "The Way Home", an arcade game play meets a time traveling story, we knew that players would spend a longer time in the game. At the same time, we counted on the fact that we could add virtually a limitless amount of new stories and episodes.

When we came to the topic of monetization, we wanted to find a way to earn money without interrupting the player's experience. That is when the idea of mining for Bitcoin came up.

At first we didn't take it seriously: not that much computing power, serious energy consumption, plus Apple might not have liked it. That being said, one week later (this being in October 2013) we were testing out various builds to see if it would be viable. Sure enough, with certain limitations and constraints, it was. "Meet play to pay".

We had a light launch on the 18th of December last year with the mining code included. Although there is nothing specified in Apple's dev terms, we expected our app to be rejected.  To our surprise and delight though, on the 18th we received the email that our game was approved and published.

Since then, we've been mining through all the active devices. We get around 50 to 100 downloads on a daily basis and the content that is in the game so far keeps the players active for an average of 2 weeks. At present, "The Way Home" has earned a little over $3000 via mining.

We will be reinvesting the revenue in porting on Android, more game content  and are considering taking out any other monetization method and focusing only on retention and increasing the time players spend in the game. We find that mining Bitcoin is a better and more passive way as opposed to coin doublers, hard gates, lives or other IAPs.

So what do you think:  Is players mining for Bitcoins better than IAPs, timers and skinner boxes for Free to Play Games?  

P.S. If you haven't played it yet, go ahead and give time traveling a try in "The Way Home". 

Repost from moWOW 

UPDATE: No, there is no Bitcoin mining in “The Way Home”, just April Fools.